The Enduring Conflict

Before the 41st annual convention of Kiwanis International Club in San Francisco, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles last week delivered the first full-dress U.S. answer to Nikita Khrushchev's celebrated "secret" speech in the Kremlin (TIME, June 11 ). Reading solemnly from a text that the President had approved in outline, Dulles marked out the fronts in the essential conflict before the world: on one side despotism, however muted; on the other democracy, however confused.

"We confidently take up the challenge of the Soviet Communists to compare our systems," said Dulles, adding that if Communism was really as good as advertised, Khrushchev ought to try letting his people vote on it. "The Russian people have now had 39 years . . . the people of Eastern Europe have had a decade or more to appraise the system . . . The Soviet leaders are now unwilling to submit to the verdict of the peoples who know it best." Skillfully, Dulles picked up the sword of Khrushchev's own speech to point and prick at the Communist system, pointing out that:

Khrushchev himself is a despot and the speech "the most damning indictment of despotism ever made by a despot."

P: Khrushchev exposed the inability of the Communist system "to liquidate its own evil leadership."

P: Khrushchev and Bulganin were intimates and close colleagues of Stalin and benefited directly from his purges. "They knew full well what was going on."

P: If, under Khrushchev and Bulganin, Communism is seriously trying to reform from one-man misrule, what about Red China, which has "indeed sought to outdo Stalin in brutality?"

Soviet despotism has attained a rapid rate of industrialization, Dulles conceded, partly due to the use of forced labor. The new countries of Asia and Africa might be lured toward the Communist system to achieve rapid economic gains unless they understand that freedom offers something better. "Our free society derives its principal momentum from its religious character. We believe in the spiritual nature of man, and in the human dignity which results from the fact that man has his origin and destiny in God. Such beliefs provide a constant and powerful compulsion toward peaceful change toward a better world . . . During a period when international Communism was forcibly extending its dominion over more than 650 million alien people . . . the free nations were according independence to 17 nations with aggregate populations of around 650 million. Thus we have the most dramatic contrast between the dynamic liberalism of free societies and the brutal reactionism of those who glorify physical power.

"We are not to be complacent and feel that our past automatically assures our future . . . The free societies must make clear, so that none can doubt, their own constant dedication to the liberal principles of peaceful change. It is not enough to prove that despotism is bad. It is equally necessary to go on--and on--proving that freedom is good."

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