Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
Where conditions permitted, the Soviet rulers have stimulated and aided
armed insurrection by communist-led revolutionary forces, as in Greece,
Indo-China, the Philippines, and China, or outright aggression by one of
their satellites, as in Korea.
Where the forces of nationalism, independence, and economic change were at
work throughout the great sweep of Asia and Africa, the communists tried to
identify themselves with the cause of progress, tried to picture themselves
as the friends of freedom and advancement--surely one of the most cynical
efforts of which history offers record.
Thus, everywhere in the free world, the communists seek to fish in troubled
waters, to seize more countries, to enslave more millions of human souls.
They were, and are, ready to ally themselves with any group, from the
extreme left to the extreme right, that offers them an opportunity to
advance their ends.
Geography gives them a central position. They are both a European and an
Asian power, with borders touching many of the most sensitive and vital
areas in the free world around them. So situated, they can use their armies
and their economic power to set up simultaneously a whole series of
threats--or inducements--to such widely dispersed places as Western
Germany, Iran, and Japan. These pressures and attractions can be sustained
at will, or quickly shifted from place to place.
Thus the communist rulers are moving, with implacable will, to create
greater strength in their vast empire, and to create weakness and division
in the free world, preparing for the time their false creed teaches them
must come: the time when the whole world outside their sway will be so torn
by strife and contradictions that it will be ripe for the communist
plucking.
This is the heart of the distorted Marxist interpretation of history. This
is the glass through which Moscow and Peiping look out upon the world, the
glass through which they see the rest of us. They seem really to believe
that history is on their side. And they are trying to boost "history"
along, at every opportunity, in every way they can.
I have set forth here the nature of the communist menace confronting our
Republic and the whole free world. This is the measure of the challenge we
have faced since World War II--a challenge partly military and partly
economic, partly moral and partly intellectual, confronting us at every
level of human endeavor and all around the world.
It has been and must be the free world's purpose not only to organize
defenses against aggression and subversion, not only to build a structure
of resistance and salvation for the community of nations outside the iron
curtain, but in addition to give expression and opportunity to the forces
of growth and progress in the free world, to so organize and unify the
cooperative community of free men that we will not crumble but grow
stronger over the years, and the Soviet empire, not the free world, will
eventually have to change its ways or fall.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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