Mr. Hunter, whose career as a foreign correspondent, author, editor, world traveler, and specialist in propaganda warfare, qualifies him as an authority on Communist propaganda techniques, stated:
“I spent 30 years, a little bit more perhaps, in countries under various forms of Communist pressure and attack. What I am witnessing in America is no different from what I saw in those other countries. I am often referred to as someone who has made phenomenal predictions that proved correct on things to come. Actually, I have never made a prediction as such in my life. I have only predicted in the manner that one predicts the total of 4 after seeing the figures 2 plus 2.
“I have been watching developments under communism in other parts of the world, and now I see exactly the same developments here in America.”
These developments, he continued, “include, first of all, the penetration of our leadership circles by a softening up and creating a defeatist state of mind. This includes penetration of our educational circles by a similar state of mind, in addition to one other thing—the long-range perspective of the professor who is above anything that is happening here and now, and considers himself as an objective spectator in a long, long vista of history.
“I see, primarily, as part of this softening up process in America, the liquidation of our attitudes on what we used to recognize as right and wrong, what we used to accept as absolute moral standards. We now confuse moral standards with the sophistication of dialectical materialism, with a Communist crackpot Communist crackpot theology which teaches that everything changes, and that what is right or wrong, good or bad, changes as well. So nothing they say is really good or bad. There is no such thing as truth or a lie; and any belief we actually held was simply your being unsophisticated. They don’t say this in so many words, except to those who are already indoctrinated in communism.
“What they do say to the rest of us is to be objective; and then they twist that word 'objective’ into meaning what they mean by dialectical materialism.”
“War has changed its form,” Mr. Hunter declared. “The Communists have discovered that a man killed by a bullet is useless. He can dig no coal. They have discovered that a demolished city is useless. Its mills produce no cloth. The objective of Communist warfare is to capture intact the minds of the people and their possessions, so they can be put to use. This is the modern conception of slavery that puts all the others in the kindergarten age.
“The United States is the main battlefield in this Red war. I mean specifically the people and the oil and the resources of the United States.
“It should be obvious to anyone who has observed the so-called cold war that the United States is its principal target. We need only read what the Communists themselves say, but we refuse to do so, exactly as we could not believe that Hitler meant what he said in Mein Kampf.
“The first battles in this total war have already been won by the forces of international communism in the United States. These victories are identical to those they have won in every country which they have ultimately taken over. They have succeeded in softening up a large element of the American population, particularly among those to whom we look for guidance, our so-called intellectuals and our so-called liberal circles. They have succeeded in making the United States think and talk of a coexistence period, as if that were an end in itself; while in other parts of the world, as in India, the Reds frankly explain that this coexistence is merely intended to give the Americans an easy way to choose their road toward communism.
“This is strategy. The Kremlin is merely giving the United States a choice in surrendering by voluntary change of attitude, to avoid more destructive ways of surrender. Unfortunately, in the United States, large elements, mainly among our non-Communist population, have been softened up into believing that if we can just stall on this situation, it will take care of itself. The Reds have succeeded in inducing business communities to look to Soviet trade as a means of restoring prosperity. Large business elements, with all their financial and other resources, are now being used to help the Communist objective of softening up America for recognition and acceptance of Red China, for instance.”
The Communists are being abetted in their brainwashing program in the United States, Mr. Hunter declared, by the collapse of traditional American ideals of self-reliance and individual integrity.
“The Communists have been in operation for a full generation, taking strategic advantage of the American principles, exploiting the best sides in our characters as vulnerabilities, and succeeding for a generation in changing the characteristics of Americans. I remember when I was a young man, every personnel department was looking for leadership qualities. What was sought was a man’s capacity as an individual to achieve new things. Today that is not even considered by personnel departments in their employment policies. They ask, instead, if the man ‘gets along’ with everybody. They do not ask what is his individuality; they ask how he conforms. When we raise a young man to believe that at all costs he must get on with everyone, we have put him into a state of mind that almost guarantees, if he falls into the hands
of an enemy such as the Communists, that he will react as he had been raised, to try ‘to get on,’ because he must not be ‘antisocial.’
“Being ‘antisocial’ has become the cardinal sin in our society. We have to again go back to characteristics of ours which made us, as individuals, say that what is right is right, and whether or not it is antisocial, makes no difference. The young man who broadcast for the Red Chinese was simply ‘getting along’ as he had been taught to do by our educators.”
As an example of the uccess the Communists are achieving, Mr. Hunter cited statistics on American prisoners of war in Korea.
“Never before in history had so many captured Americans gone to the aid of the enemy.
“For 2 years the services studied the records of the prisoners. What they found was not pretty.
“A total of 7,190 Americans were captured. Of these, 6,656 were Army troops, 263 were airmen, 231 Marines, 40 Navy men.
“In every war in American history some men have managed to escape. Korea was the exception.
“Roughly 1 of every 3 American prisoners collaborated with the Communists in some way, either as informants or as propagandists.
“In the 20 prison camps, 2, 730 of the 7,190 Americans died, the highest morality rate among prisoners in United States history. Many of them died unnecessarily. They either did not know how to take care of themselves of they just lay down and quit. Some sick or wounded died of malnutrition abandoned by their comrades.
“Discipline among Americans was almost nonexistent. It was a case of dog eat dog for food, cigarettes, blankets, clothes.
“For the first time in history, Americans -- 21 of them -- swallowed the enemy’s propaganda line and declined to return to their own people.”
Mr. Hunter declared that in the struggle with the Soviet Union, “we are losing so fast that unless we put a very drastic end to it, the question of who is winning will be academic in a decade.”
“People at lectures and elsewhere,” he declared, “frequently ask that of me, as if begging me to say that we are winning. I wish I could, but one only has to think of the position of the United States at the end of the war and compare it to now. We only have to look at the map of the world as it was when signed the peace on the battleship Missouri and compare it to the map now. Great areas with enormous populations have fallen into the hands of the Reds, not through any approximation to the democratic process, but through sheer power pressures, by psychological warfare.”
Even an ultimate superiority in military weapons may not be sufficient to guarantee the survival of the United States, Mr. Hunter cautioned.
“In Korea, we had atomic weapons, but lost the war and were unable to use those weapons because of a political and psychological climate created by the Communists. The Kremlin today is fighting total war, and this means total, not with weapons of physical destruction alone, but mental destruction, too. The new weapons are for conquest intact, of peoples and cities. The future Pearl Harbor sputnik will be used if the situation demands it. But not unless the Kremlin has first succeeded in conquering the character and minds of a large enough element of the American people so that it will be fitting itself into the desires and needs of the Communist apparatus, no matter whether they think of themselves as Red or anti-Communist.”
Mr. Hunter continued: “The most deadly misconception of all, that requires a softening up in our thinking before we can make it, is the idea that there are different kinds of communism, and that besides international communism there is something called national communism, which fundamentally differs. There is nothing of the sort. We are again interpreting, on the basis of wishful thinking, what the Communists themselves are plainly saying. We base this national communism conception on Titoism. Tito at no time disowned or expressed doubt in any of the fundamental tenets of communism, and he is today expending all the time he can in trying to tell the world that he believes in communism, intends Communist objectives to win out in the long run all over the world. Communism in this, too, has been able, as always, to get the help it needs from the non-Communist and principally the anti-Communist world.
“Each time there has been a crisis in Soviet Russia, it could depend on the outside world for help. Today, under the theory that there are different forms of communism, and some Communist forms are not really Communist, or are less Communist than others, we are giving through aid programs and such propaganda assists as so-called exchange scholarships, the help and sustenance that these Communist countries require to survive. I have heard that under certain technical requirements of the law, completely fantastic statements have come from the White House and the State Department that communism in Yugoslavia really isn’t communism any more, and that communism in Poland is not real communism. I thought we had learned our lesson in China. We said that the communism of China, the communism of Mao Tse-tung was not really communism. We said it was not the communism of Moscow. Mao Tse-tung was saying it was the same communism, exactly as Tito says that the Communist ideology is basically the same everywhere, and that the objective for a Communist world is identical.”
