A slight or even a substantial increase in economic welfare in the Asian states seems to the author to favor a sharp increase in Communist strength. When people are desperately poor or sick they cannot worry about causes. When they become moderately well off--well enough off to know that they are despised, poor by our standards, ignorant by our standards--then the point of psychological frenzy comes in.
=Propaganda Techniques in the Seven Wars.= Neither in the Chinese civil war nor in the seven other wars listed has there been much refinement of propaganda techniques over World War II. As a matter of fact, it took the Korean war two years to come up to the standards of Normandy. It is amazing how many propaganda techniques had become lost arts between 1945 and 1950. The author himself flew _under_ the Chinese Communist forces along the Han River in March 1951 when the voice plane in which he rode as an observer had to hug the valley bottoms in order to get its message to the Chinese ground forces past the sound of its own propellers; instead of ingenious, up-to-the-minute gadgets to dispense leaflets the author joined the young officers in the plane in throwing the leaflets out of the plane door by hand. He thought ruefully about the leaflet bombs and leaflet dispensers which had been used in Europe and in Burma, and when he returned unharmed to Taegu he submitted one more red-hot memorandum recommending the obvious.
[Illustration: _Figure 74: Divisive Propaganda, Korean Model._ In this leaflet an attempt is made to show the Asians-die-for-the-Kremlin theme.]
The strategic PsyWar self-limitations imposed by the United States on the United States in the Korean war were also crippling. The United States did not desire anything which a professional soldier would recognize as victory. U.S. opinion was divided as to whether all of Korea should be liberated by UN forces. At the policy-making level--certainly among our allies--there was pretty general agreement to remain at peace with the supply dumps and high command of the Chinese Communist forces in Manchuria and China while fighting the forward echelons of those forces in Korea. The United States would not accept defeat nor would it seek a decisive victory because victory might have involved the risk of war.