What Do They Mean, Coexistence?

Our Ambassador to Unesco and Former United States Senator Discusses the Dangers of Assuming That America and the Soviet Union Attach the Same Significance to This Crucial Concept

An Appealing and seemingly reasonable phrase has crept into the world-wide vocabulary of international politics. That phrase is "peaceful coexistence." In the last few months I have encountered it in articles by two of America's most sophisticated political writers, Walter Lippmann and John Kenneth Galbraith; both used it without qualification in a context which suggested that the phrase means what it seems to mean, that it means "peace."

"Peaceful coexistence" is a Soviet term, but not a new-minted slogan fresh out of Agitprop. It goes back many years--it is said to go back to Trotsky--and it is used to describe a basic Communist tactical formula. As the Russians mean it, peaceful coexistence does indeed mean avoidance of nuclear or "hot" war. However, it also means the encouragement of many other forms of conflict which might advance world communism. It embraces all forms of subversion against democratic regimes as well as support of local "wars of liberation." The latter, of course, are wars for the overthrow of non-Communist regimes such as those in South Korea and South Vietnam.

In May of 1964, while I was in Moscow, Mikhail Suslov, the longtime accepted theoretician in the Party Presidium, restated the position: "In the conditions of the struggle for peace and peaceful coexistence, the national liberation movement is gaining ever more victories and the class struggle in the capitalist countries is mounting steadily." The struggle for peaceful coexistence, he said, "strengthens the positions of the Communist Parties as a nationwide political force."

In Paris in November 1964 I collided with the phrase when I served as chairman of the U. S. delegation to the biennial General Conference of UNESCO. The delegation of the U. S. S. R. came to the Conference armed with 102 draft resolutions--resolutions which in effect called upon UNESCO to adopt as its own much of the ideological baggage of international communism. I pointed out that UNESCO hadn't the time, the competence, the authority or the disposition to debate such politically inspired resolutions. Such debates, if they were to be held, were for the UN itself. I announced that if the Soviet Union persisted in its submissions I would ask the State Department to draft 204 U. S. ideological resolutions for the 1966 General Conference.

I chose one Soviet resolution as an example--a declaration that virtually would have centered UNESCO's entire program in the social sciences around the phrase "peaceful coexistence."

The Messrs. Lippmann and Galbraith understand that Russia has no intention of abandoning the Cold War. But most delegates to UNESCO conferences--like most readers of Lippmann and Galbraith--instinctively seek to define the phrase "peaceful coexistence" in terms of their cherished dreams--their yearnings for a world in which nations will live as neighbors, even if not good ones; and, ideally, will cooperate with one another for the achievement of a better world for all. Most see in the phrase the promise of a world in which each nation can pursue its own destiny in ways of its own choice, quite free from outside political or military interference.

It isn't only the West that would like to interpret peaceful coexistence to mean nonaggression and even peaceful cooperation. The heads of the nonaligned states, meeting in Cairo shortly before the UNESCO conference, solemnly defined peaceful coexistence as meaning that "every state must abstain from interfering in the affairs of other states, whether openly or insidiously, or by means of subversion and various forms of political, economic and military pressure."

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Do the inventors of peaceful coexistence accept any such definition? What do they say it means? I documented this for the benefit of the UNESCO delegates.

In August 1963, the Soviet critic Leonid Timofeyev put it this way for domestic consumption in the U. S. S. R.:

"Many of those in the West who in principle accept peaceful coexistence between capitalist and Socialist countries interpret it in a different way from Marxist-Leninists. Many bourgeois and Social Democratic ideologists take peaceful coexistence to mean a reconciliation of the two warring, irreconcilable classes and say that it leads to a 'fadeout' of the struggle between the antagonistic class ideologies. We cannot accept this distorted (continued on page 126)Coexistence(continued from page 123) interpretation of the policy of peaceful coexistence. This slurs over its class substance and direction. This ignores the irreconcilable, antagonistic social contradictions of the modern world."

In other words, it is not peaceful and it contemplates coexistence only as a means to maneuver or subvert non-Communist nations into communism.

Nikita Khrushchev had this to say about it:

"The policy of peaceful coexistence, as regards its social content, is a form of intense economic, political and ideological struggle against aggressive forces of imperialism in the international area. Peaceful coexistence helps to develop the forces struggling for socialism, and in capitalistic countries it facilitates the activities of Communist parties." Khrushchev equated peaceful coexistence with support of the so-called wars of liberation. He declared: "Peaceful coexistence is Communist doctrine of political and propaganda warfare." One can hardly put it faster than that.

What does Mr. Brezhnev, the new First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, have to say about it? Mr. Brezhnev makes it clear that peaceful coexistence is a term to describe partisan political warfare, warfare designed to gain the objective of world communism. In a statement to the Supreme Soviet in September 1963, he declared:

"The Soviet Union and other socialist countries stand firmly on the position of a Leninist policy of peaceful coexistence. Nothing and no one will shake their resolution to struggle consistently for the triumph of socialism and communism."

And Premier Kosygin said a year ago in Bratislava: "The Soviet Union and Socialist Czechoslovakia again confirm the intrepid loyalty of our country to the policy of peace, friendship and cooperation and loyalty to the Leninist course of peaceful coexistence."

I pointed out to the UNESCO Conference that the International Law Association, at its Tokyo meeting in August 1964, dropped the phrase "peaceful coexistence" from its agenda after years of wholly unsuccessful efforts to clarify or codify what it means. The Association decided that the phrase is too murky and tendentious to use. Nor has the General Assembly of the United Nations ever accepted the concept of peaceful coexistence. Indeed, it has consistently refused to do so. If the term is to be used in international discourse the Assembly is the forum where it should be debated. The General Assembly quite rightly promotes the positive concept of neighborly relations and international cooperation, not the negative concept of peaceful coexistence.

When I returned from Paris to the U. S. in late November 1964 I invited to dinner Mr. Alexander Chakovsky, the editor of the Soviet newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta, along with other Soviet visitors to New York. I didn't get a chance to press him on peaceful coexistence. But Mr. George Feifer, writing later in The New York Times Magazine, reported that Mr. Chakovsky had a far more temperate version than those I have quoted:

"We stand 100 percent for peaceful coexistence between our nations. But antagonistic ideologies cannot possibly coexist peacefully. Inevitably they remain at war until the inevitable demise of capitalism. But mind you this is a peaceful war--no guns, no bullets, not even insults--simply the competition of ideas, goals, values, philosophies."

Perhaps Mr. Chakovsky's "not even insults" is the export definition; one reads and hears plenty of insults in the Soviet propaganda output!

I cannot claim that my "intervention" before UNESCO in Paris permanently transformed the attitudes of the UNESCO delegations--but it helped to clear the atmosphere. The Soviet resolution on peaceful coexistence was shelved, and most of the remaining 101 Soviet resolutions died a natural death. Further, it was agreed that henceforward when the phrase was used it would be translated in Spanish and English texts as "peaceful cooperation" and "peacefully living together." This partially kills off within UNESCO the patented and loaded Soviet term. However, the dictionary sponsored by the French Academy translates the phrase literally--apparently on the theory that it is widely used and must therefore be listed--but without a definition. The Russians, of course, will stick with their phrase. But the issue had been dramatized for UNESCO and it is to be hoped that a similar debate will help achieve clarification in other UN agencies.

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For 50 years after Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto in 1848, communism was kept alive, with little organization, backing or support, by the propaganda of a handful of disciples. V. I. Lenin, their greatest disciple, was a propaganda genius. Two of his earliest polemical tracts, written from exile just after the turn of the century, Where to Begin and What Is to Be Done, stressed the primary role of propaganda. "Without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolution.... We must go among all people as theoreticians, as propagandists, as agitators and as organizers.... The principal thing, of course, is propaganda and agitation." Lenin perceived that theory could serve not only as an instrument of internal discipline but a formidable external striking weapon.

When the Russian disciples of Lenin aggressively promote phrases such as "peaceful coexistence," to what extent are they deliberately being wholly propagandistic in the Lenin tradition, and to what extent are they merely overly enthusiastic crusaders? I suspect something of both is often present. This is a relatively new phenomenon. In Moscow last May I spent an afternoon with the top editors of the Soviet encyclopedia. They asked in wonderment why Encyclopaedia Britannica has no article on peaceful coexistence. They contended that this concept is the most important doctrine in the international relations of our era. (Recent editions of Britannica have so many articles on international relations that a separate 1000-word article is included merely to list them--but there is none on peaceful coexistence.) Were these editors deliberately propagandizing me? I think not. They believe this phrase describes a Soviet foreign policy which aims to prevent open warfare while awaiting the Communist subjugation of the world. To them, it is thus at the hopeful heart of our era. Russian intellectuals often express astonishment to hear that many Americans are suspicious of the word propaganda. To the confirmed Communists--public education, journalism and propaganda tend to be much the same thing.

To almost every "communicator" in the U. S. S. R., communism and its slogans are the right and natural objectives; they are central to education for the good society. They dominate every aspect of life. They lie at the heart of the hope to convert the human race to the Communist cause. Thus to the Russian communicators, propagandizing is their obligation and civic duty, and if the propaganda sometimes overstates or distorts, well, it's all in the good cause established in Leninist doctrine as the end which justifies the propaganda means.

One purpose of Communist propaganda outside the Soviet Union, to paraphrase Professor Harold Lasswell of Yale, is "to economize the material cost of world domination." Thus the propaganda, such as the phrase "peaceful coexistence," is no more than an inexpensive kind of weapon.

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Shortly after V-J Day in 1945, after I had become Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, I was dismayed to find the U. S. S. R. swinging its world-wide propaganda guns away from Germany and Japan and training them on the United States. Never had this country been subjected to such verbal ferocity. In several dozen languages, and on every conceivable count, we were labeled as "jackals" and "hyenas," without heart or culture. If the United States refused loans and favors to other nations, it was portrayed as rich and selfish. If it made loans or granted favors, it was seeking to (concluded on page 299)Coexistence(continued from page 126) enslave foreign peoples. If it took a firm position on any issue, it was militaristic and imperialistic. If it yielded, this was evidence of the inner decay of capitalism.

Thus, in May of 1948, when I headed the U. S. delegation to the first (and thus far the only) United Nations Conference on Freedom of the Press, in Geneva, I seized the occasion to describe Soviet propaganda. No previous U. S. representative at any international post-War conference had attempted to do so. Indeed, none had aggressively replied to the vicious attacks upon us by Vishinsky and others. Our representatives had acted as if, by their silence and failure to respond, this would help bring matters back to "normal," that the attacks would evaporate and go away. When, in May of 1948, I flew from Geneva to Paris especially to speak my mind--for the benefit of the Russians as well as the journalists who had invited me to speak to the Anglo-American Press Club, I became the first official U. S. spokesman to deal bluntly and directly with the Russians on this issue. I said:

The Soviets are masters of propaganda, which they use to distort facts and obscure real objectives. Around the clock and in several dozen languages Soviet propagandists appropriate, degrade and bastardize the words which are the hard-earned and world-accepted currency of free men--liberty, equality, fraternity, independence, justice, freedom, democracy.

The U. S. S. R. insists with a thousand amplified voices that repression is freedom, and that true freedom elsewhere in the world is slavery; they insist that the police state is a democracy, and that democracy in other countries is dictatorship by monopoly capitalists. They assert that aggression is peace and liberation, and that true liberation is aggression--that complete state control of man's thought and expression of freedom is expression, and that true freedom of expression among free men is dictatorship.

The Russians keep hammering away at such themes as: The United States is undemocratic and reactionary; the United States is culturally backward; the United States is on the verge of a catastrophic depression from which it is trying to extricate itself by imperialistic adventures.

The age-old trick of the propagandists--from the day of the Sophists the the day of Dr. Goebbels--has been to confuse and confound the listener by labeling black as white and white as black. Its latest manifestation is this official attempt to depreciate the word-currency of free men, to drive the sound currency of clear meanings from the market place of ideas.

The late Anne O'Hare McCormick, whose perceptive columns on international affairs illuminated The New York Times editorial page for many years, shortly described the Soviet propaganda as "Upside Down Language." She was prompted by my speech in Paris--but she had had plenty of firsthand experience of her own.

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Today there is no lessening in the overwhelming dedication of Communists to the promotion of their propaganda. However, from my five visits to the U. S. S. R. since 1955 I have confirmed the major extent to which many of the practitioners of propaganda seem to believe much of what they say, even when it seems to us patently false. This is the result of their lifelong indoctrination and self-indoctrination. Thus the Communist propaganda cannot be said to be carried on with total cynicism, through the incessant cold and deliberate perversion of truth in the manner of Herr Goebbels.

It may be that the world's evolving understanding of the term "peaceful coexistence," with nudges from the Messrs. Lippmann and Galbraith, will help transform its meaning from what the Communist leaders themselves understand and define it. Will the phrase in another few years lose some of its Communist belligerency? This is a conceivable development which I have pointed out to the State Department. Meanwhile, however, I suggest that we of the non-Communist world must remain alert to the true and present meaning of such terms as "peaceful coexistence" as defined for us by their Communist advocates. Let us keep steadily in mind that, to Communists, "peaceful coexistence" is still just a nicer name for "cold war." And let us never forget that many great and important words are indeed "upside-down words" and do not mean the same thing to them as to us.