Lewis Mumford Sees Fascism in Pentagon

America's foreign policy-makers have an essentially fascist outlook, Lewis Mumford said last night.

They have "a fantasy of absolute power." They believe in "permanent war." And they "conceive that sometime there must be a showdown" between the major countries.

This, he said, is why the men in Washington regard China as the ultimate enemy in Vietnam: "How the Pentagon would like China to enter the war so they could blast out large sections of her cities!"

The fantasy, he said, depends on the hydrogen bomb. And because of the bomb "a totalitarian system"--composed of the AEC, the CIA, and the Pentagon--"dedicated to the welfare of its totalitarian weapons," has been "superimposed on our democratic system."

But the idea of total destruction, Mumford said won acceptance well before the first atomic bomb was dropped. This came with "strategic bombing," which he said was a Fascist invention.

"Ths was the tragedy of the war," the the president of the American Academy of Arts and Science stated. "In the course of fighting we took over the strategy of fascism" and the question of moral justifiability has never entered the American military mind since then.

Mumford concluded by telling the audience that packed the Leverett House Old Library that America should get out of Vietnam and apologize to the world and try to repair some of the damage it has done there.