A Belligerent Neighbor

Karl Marx was still a student in 1835 when a brilliant French historian, Alexis de Tocqueville, called the attention of the world to the rise of two great nations, one of those was dedicated to freedom, the other was founded in servitude "the conquest of the America gain by the ploughshare , he wrote '' those of the Russian by the sword." The Soviet Union is open and formally dedicated to the victory of communism all over the world. Will it eventually win, as its leaders constantly predict? Or will it perhaps gradually loss its militancy and become content to live side by side with other systems? Or will it change it doctrines and adopt a less extreme form of government? Lenin, the strategist of Russian marxism, believed that communism could triumph if the workers of the world rose against their capitalist government and that state after state beginning with Germany, world establish a communists system. But, he warned before the last great capitalist state succumbed they will result to war against communism, Stalin, less sanguine about the rising of the workers, determined to build a strong state that could defend itself under any circumstances.Faced with the chance of nuclear war, Khrushchev abandoned the thesis that war was inevitable "one cannot repeat" he once stated, what the great Lenin in completely different historians condition without considering the concrete situation and the change in the balance of forces on a whole scale. By repudiating a fundamental tenet of Lenin's doctrine Khrushchev may well have weakened Marxism by opening to question it claims to eternal verity and infallibility. Yet despite Khrushchev's declaration that the communists world could pursue a policy of "peaceful coexistence" with its adversaries, and eventually win the struggle by demonstrating to the world and particularly to the new nations, that communism was superior to capitalism,neither he nor his successors discarded their arsenal of revolutionary weapons. The condemning nuclear war as suicide, the soviet leaders have declared that "wars of liberation " are justified and in Vietnam they have demonstrated how effectively subversion, terror and guerrilla warfare can paralyses if not destroy a system based based on democracy.In Africa and Latin America, communist agent bearing substantial gifts in the form of economic aid have tried to win the allegiance of new governments. In Africa they have gone so far as to supply weapons and guerrilla training to insurgent groups. Elsewhere, infiltration of democratic regimes has succeeded in paralysing parliamentary government and opening the way to communists regimes. For the soviet leaders, each method is costly. Guerrilla wars, as Vietnam has shown, foreign aid requires diverting goods from under- supplied home markets. It is difficult to persuade the domestic consumer that he must sacrifice his needs for some faraway little brother in the jingle. But however costly, these weapons are all available and the kremlin leaders have not hesitated to use them whenever there seems to be a chance of success. The activities of undercover agents, infiltrator and subversions in more advanced areas seriously undermine faith in the kremlin's profession of peaceful coexistence, more to story to deliver .