An event such as the liberation of Indochina from Japanese military occupation in 1945, met competently and reasonably by the standards of an anticipated "world of 1946," which unfortunately never materialized, led to the frustrations, bloodshed, deceit, and warfare of the late 1940s, and by 1954 became partially intelligible as a facet of the free world's struggle against Communism.
=New Interpretations of Policy and Propaganda.= Polemic writing has been done concerning the role of propaganda, psychological warfare, psychological strategy, and comparable operations. In many instances the polemics have involved the presentation of two sides, each of which was right--one side maintaining that the old-fashioned world of free, sovereign nations, meeting in a parliament of man as constituted in the United Nations, could and should use the "realities" of traditional power politics as a guide to the present and the future, and should avoid the hopelessness, terrorism, and fanaticism of chronic ideological war; the other side with equal merits has often argued that the ideological war is here, that its deniers are the witting or unwitting sympathizers or appeasers of Communism, that their "realities" are outmoded, and that the United States must face up to a crusade which will end in annihilation or death for either the Communist system or the constitutional democratic group of states.
What such polemics overlook is the terrifying probability that events may happen so rapidly that no one on either the Communist or anti-Communist side is capable of assimilating a new datum, such as the development of the hydrogen bomb, the death of Stalin, or the appearance of Israel among the nations, _until well after the event has occurred_. The occurrence of public events in all past civilizations has involved a considerable number of public agreements on the major hypotheses concerned; as pointed out earlier in this book, the antagonists in older wars usually, though not always, knew what the war was about. Today the spiritual, psychological, logical, and scientific inconsistencies and paradoxes within each system are so deep as to make the definition of long-range goals almost impossible. Any one goal, such as the establishment of peace, the appreciation of an international system of alliances against aggression, the maintenance of national sovereignty, the protection of a free-enterprise economy, the assurance of self-determination to non-self-governing peoples, or the like, may, _if emphasized_, contradict the concomitant goals which support it.