BLIND MAN'S BATTLE

One far-reaching product of this 1959 assembly was a 32-page pamphlet entitled Ideology and Co-Existence. After 1956, when Krushchev had denounced Stalin, it seemed to many lovers of democracy and peace that the Soviet Union's old aggressiveness was giving way to a milder competition. The phrase 'peaceful co-existence', which Krushchev popularised, led to the hope that the world was emerging into a less dangerous rivalry between the democracies and the Communist dictatorships.

Buchman did not subscribe to this view. He had been proclaiming for more than a dozen years that democracy without a moral and spiritual ideology at its heart was no match for totalitarians of Right or Left. In his opening address at the assembly in 1959 he had quoted with approval the words of a former American Chief of Naval Operations and Ambassador in Moscow, Admiral William Standley, that 'the choice for America is moral re-armament or communism'.1 Both Standley and Buchman were referring to the ideologies rather than the organisations. Neither would have said that the choice was between the Oxford Group and the Communist Party. Buchman was aiming for a revolution through which the Cross of Christ could change Communists and non-Communists alike.

The pamphlet, on the other hand, spent much of its space alerting people to the strategies and tactics of Communism. It quoted from Russian, Chinese and other ideologists of the day to show that the long-term aim of revolutionary Communism was still world domination, and warned Western leaders that if they were to meet Communists on equal terms they needed an equally passionately-held philosophy and plan and a more disciplined way of life. The word 'ideology' was defined as 'an idea that dominates the whole person - his motives, his thinking, his living - and fights with a strategy to get everybody else to live the same way'.

Buchman was quoted to the effect that 'the battle for America is the battle for the mind of America'. 'A nation's thinking is in ruins before a nation is in ruins,' the quotation continued. 'People get confused as to whether it is a question of being rightist or leftist, but the one thing we really need is to be guided by God's Holy Spirit... America does not have much of her great moral heritage left. Just think, if we fail to give the emphasis to a moral climate, where will our democracy go? Some of us have been so busy looking after our own affairs that we have forgotten to look after the nation ... The true battle-line in the world today is not between class and class, not between race and race. The battle is between Christ and anti-Christ. "Choose ye this day whom ye will serve." '2

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