Union of People, Not League of States, Can Bring Lasting Peace
Streit, Clarence
Union of People, Not League of States, Can Bring Lasting Peace By Clarence Streit Former New York Times Geneva Correspondent fTAPITAL AND LABOR have a common interest in ^ the question of war or...
...So, in a state of gloomy apathy, the average German goes on as he is told by the Nazi bosses...
...Also, that in a typical telephone office, the introduction of the dial deprived eighty in one hundred opera~f?rs~?f~lneir jobs...
...to work and to produce for tfeeb} own needs...
...There are two ways, at bottom, to organize inter-state government, for there are but two basic units—the state or the individual citizen...
...No one knows yet who the final belligerents will be...
...They realize that to this end tiiey ?5 must, as the very first preliminary, rid themselves of the Nazi regime...
...and-sale, ca^h-and-carry, and old lust for the long green, the world could gasp a little at the revelation of national morale and V shrug off the whole affair...
...Duff Cooper's recent speech condemning all Germans must, of course, be interpreted in the light of war propaganda and the obviously increasing tempo of the Allied hate-Germany campaign...
...Philadelphia boycotted New Jersey money, Boston boycotted Rhode Island grain...
...By organizing government for the people instead of for the states they got away from the basic eeHiWcJ the failure of all leagues...
...They left all these powers where they cept five which they shifted to the Union governllelj^ They thus gained for themselves and us (1) our jfpflji ful Union defense forces...
...It would evolve an "honorable" dictatorship, military or otherwise, dependent on Western support and later on to be stabilized, and perhaps even democratized, under the crown of the Hohenzollerns or some other puppet dynasties...
...The oflkers that betrayed their country, violated their oaths and trampled on their personal honor were not bought as corporations used to buy Chicago aldermen, at so much a head, unpicked...
...We have not yet learned that the only way we can avoid a bad peace is by organizing effective inter-state government in the world...
...When defective or overstrained equipment has brought about a terrible wreck the press agent can still saw the responsibility off upon a dead engineer.________¦ Promise of Democratic Reich Would Spur Anti-Hitler Drive in Germany By Johann Hirsck Former Editor of Vienna drbeirenerrenej I ONDON...
...i m .. Under the Nazi rule, German economy has already become highly organized and centralized...
...And so we Inter-democracy Federal Unionists propoef that we follow this old American example now...
...But in one respect it steadfastly pursues the approved old methods...
...Congress under the League became the laughing-stock Geneva did...
...The gang's all here— What the hell do we care...
...The military, who cooperated in Hitler's rise to power...
...In the past seven years much has been gained in the United States in the way of greater security for the common man...
...in his book, "Union Now...
...The industrialists, who paid the brownshirt bill...
...We learned that twenty years ago...
...These social forces stood behind the Kaiser...
...Dewey's rip-rparing candidacy has hitherto lacked the inspiration of song, that great mover of the human emotions...
...Instead of defending the liberties and rights won for us try burTorefathers we are to surrender them and try to negotiate for...
...On Th/ng Toey Don't Teach t? AMERICA, the gentlemen that used to go about declaiming * that what this country needs is a Mussolini have for some months retired behind their hands, but no one need believe they have amended their mental lesions...
...Present life in Germany, no doubt, is hard and bitter—but the future holds no hope strong and bright enough for which it would be worth fighting...
...AND even assuming that, with the hope of victory irretrievably lost, they were to approach the Western powers as the "peace party," their regime, supported by the industrialists and the Junker class, would simply restore the German Reich of 1914—that Germany of the Hohenzollern whose {imperialist aspirations resulted in the •first world war...
...Now, with the rapprochment4 of tb* two hitherto ostensibly hostile governments, a close amalgamation appeared to be in the cards, and with Russia in the ascendancy, it was likely to take the form of Germany's Bolshevizatiaa or rather Stalinization...
...In organizing a government of poeple instead of state...
...Their lot would remain ?1?-affected by the alterations in the toteli-tadian superstructure which this substitution of "National Bolshevism" for National Socialism might involve...
...pipe dreams of things that might be in Wooziland...
...As things stand now, a bolshevization of Germany after the Stalin model would mean for them hardly anything but the replacing of the Gestapo by the GPU...
...They fought in the armies, and,—if they survived—in the ranks of the unemployed, struggling to re-enter a shattered economic system...
...For, what will, what might come after...
...Eleven territorial disputes arose among the thirteen states, and some of these threatened to lead to war...
...T^O AVOID a bad peace we are increasing our arma* mente and remain pledged to send our boys overseas— to the jungles of Latin America...
...The aristocracy, personified by a Baron Von Neursth under whom the Czechs are being bludgeoned to death...
...The lack can now be easily supplied...
...of the coal barons, the steel magnates, the armament kings...
...Those on the losing side, rich and poor alike, lose even more—their freedoms...
...Within this week, Belgium and even Switzerland have been forced to take to the strong arm against them...
...IT is of paramount interest to the in-*¦ teraational labor movement, and to world- democracy in general, that this process of laying the foundations of socialism after the downfall of the Nazi regime, should go unchecked by outside interference, either from the capitalist West or from the Stalinist East, whether by military or by economic attempts...
...We shall make a wiser choice by going back first to our own history for enlightenment...
...Union Now/7' SPLATTERING tickers in a dozen metropolitan dailies spell out the news, as this is written, that the German sea transports are moving slowly behind ice breakers and destroyers towards the Swedish coast...
...How can we account for this remarkable success cat-cept by attributing it to the change in the fonnltliP ernment...
...Who will then govern...
...There were tariff wars between the states, depression, unemployment, heavy indebtedness, attempts to improve matters by money magic and by giving more power to the state governments—when the money of Rhode Island grew worthless the government sought to coerce people into accepting it...
...Union law, being enforced against individuals, avoids this danger...
...I cannot but think and continue to think that the situations In these countries demand from the Apostle of the Bended Knee something better than the profound silence he has so far maintained about them...
...Progressive development in Germany will switch over the existing powerful economic machinery from working for war and destruction to creating prosperity and plenty...
...and (5) our highly privileged WW citizenship...
...It was the expansionist tendency of the dominating social forces in Germany —of the militaristic officer corps...
...2) our rich Union ffee^tflwl market...
...J by Charles Edward RussellThe News Reel |F THE stories of treachery in Norway had no basis but bargain...
...Given a new lease of life they would soon reproduce the conditions for a further attempt at German world domination...
...concerned, is that you can run your public school curricula through a sieve and not get enough instruction in democracy to evoke a grunt from Stalin himself...
...it could rarely muster even a quorum...
...The latter is being conducted in preparation for efforts to create a home morale which will withstand the Nazis' desperate summer drives...
...And we needn't censure Norway overmuch...
...This is the first of two articles, written specialty- for The New Leader' on the plan...
...And from the experience of Germany and Italy we know that when the economic pressure is great enough, nations will be willing to make grave sacrifices of hard-won liberties in search for economic security on even a bare subsistence level...
...peace...
...Monarchy...
...These will come mostly by air...
...These questions are now to the forefront of political discussion...
...S * » • , /Itf?t •"PHE resuits...
...TPHE results were much the same as with, the League * of Nations...
...Of course there is more suffering among working people in a war...
...They were by instinct fanatical and gratuitous Fascists...
...But those who have more of the world's goods also have more targets for enemy bombs...
...France has been plagued with them...
...But this revolution will be considerably accelerated and, consequently, the war considerably shortened, if the German people had a reasonable prospect of achieving Socialism by incurring the heavy risks and terrible sacrifices inevitably involved in a revolution against the most ruthless tyranny of all times...
...Not the ambitions of a single man, of the Kaiser in 1914 and of Hitler now, and far less some mysterious aggressiveness in the German national character, caused the two world wars of this century...
...Or the Socialists, who will resume the difficult task from which they were driven...
...On the home front when the bombing planes have done their work, it matters little whether you had lived in a stately country home or in a modest dwelling in a crowded city...
...They will be argued in the coming national campaign largely as if the causes of our economic difficulties were to be found wholly within our own borders and as if .the solutions to our social and economic problems could be worked out, independently of the rest of the world and by ourselves alone...
...NATIONAL BOLSHEVISM was dis-A~ cussed as a serious possibility for a time following the outbreak of war and the conclusion of the Stalin-Hitler p*cu Even before, the assimilation of tee two systems, Hitler's Nazism and 8ts» lin's Bolshevism, had already gone fat —noy only in their similar totalitarian technique of political control, but1 In their economic structure, private enterprise in Germany having become mere and more subject to strict government direction...
...The problem is discussed above by Johann Hirsch, formerly '.a Social Democratic editor in Vienna, and now an exile in London...
...Under all conditions we must keep out of any European affairs, now and always...
...a - They had surviving in their blood after all these generations, the inheritance of that quaint old superstition of the Dark Ages about the one super-natured and divinely guided man that would ateer us out of all our troubles and straight into Elysium...
...to ? build up their organizations, to organ-' * ize their community to their own bene- V fit...
...We must choose, then, between organizing peace and government on a league or a union basis...
...It would not bring them bread, peace, or freedom...
...Last week we printed the contribution of Emil Lengyel, author and newspaper correspondent...
...The adoption of bolshevist' methods appears no longer desirable to the "radical" section of the Nazis who, for a time, had hoped that it would r—— * the masses to that passionate drive In a "holy" anti-capitalist war which .All the propaganda tricks o? Dr...
...they got away from the inability of leagues to enforce law...
...So discussion of post-conflict reconstruction becomes more difficult—and more important- Here is the third of a series on permanent peace and a new Europe...
...Anarchy...
...What else could the officers wish...
...Just as we sought to make the world safe for democracy in 1919 by organizing the victorious democracies as a League of Nations, we sought, after our first war for democracy, to keep the Atlantic coast safe for individual freedom by organizing the Thirteen democracies under the -Articles of Confederation as a league—the League of Friendship...
...And Technical Expert Kreps of the committee showed that the only bene-;iaries of the dial were the company's stockholders, which caused suspicion of another stock dividend...
...Throughout the depression it had kept men on its payroll for whom it had no work rather than see anybody unem--nlyoed...
...Negotiate with whom...
...Thus, in the long run, a retrograde liquidation of the Nazi regime by means of a military dictatorship and a revival of the monarchy would, even if it were practicable, in no way meet the true national interests of Britain and France —far less the International interests of peace, freedom and security...
...Instead they got together in Philadelphia, applied again the principles of the Declaration of Independence, abolished the League form of government that had become destructive of individual life, liberty and happiness, and instituted new government—invented the Federal Union system...
...In this day of total war the sons of rich and poor alike are drafted into the fighting lines...
...The Kremlin's Finnish adventure and consequent loss of prestige- changed the picture...
...That time has not arrived yet...
...And if you think there is none or little of it among American industrialists, just ask about discreetly of any: friends you may have among that species...
...The second is the transformation, executed by the radical wing of the Nazi party, of the existing National "Socialism" into outright National Bolshevism after the Stalin model and probably under allied Russia's pressure...
...Fourteen hours before the Nazi, assault upon Denmark the Nazi government officially and personally assured the Danish king that Germany entertained no intention of invading or interfering with Denmark, and at that moment four steamers disguised as colliers lay in Copenhagen harbor stuffed with armed men for the seizure...
...Most cherished in right wing quarters, both here and in France, is still, in spite of many disappointments, the first one...
...Once more, 0 Sage and Apostle, with whom shall we negotiate and about what...
...The social forces thereby released would turn with as much vigor against the reactionary domestic regime imposed on them as agair.st their foreign overlords...
...Passed by the Censor...
...Those who achieved a toehold, gained only a small measure of security...
...the army leaders...
...But neither a Stalinist nor a capitalist Germany will give them what they want-Exploitation would continue, and in the impoverished state of the country 1 i after the war their lots would hardly be, 1 mitigated if the fruits of their labor were then to be directed to the accumulation of private profit instead of to the greed of an insatiable war machinery...
...Our fathers assumed then, as we did in 1919, that" to keep individual freedom they must keep their own democracy free from the others...
...The times are conducive to serious thought, some tardy realizations and no more sweet...
...Certainly, the formidable machinery of Nazi suppression must first be weakened by formidable military blows, before a general rising in Germany becomes feasible...
...Mi** Rose Sullivan of the Commercial Telegraphers' Union, climbed to the stand and pointed out that all the dial fraud did ' was to "transfer work from operators that received wages to the subscribers, who didn't...
...If left untouched again, the industrialist and Junkers would produce another Hitler within another generation...
...Streit, who took a leave of absence from his paper April 1, 1939, resigned from his daily on November 1. and has since been devoting his full time as chairman of the Inter-Democracy Federal Unionista» an IttJtK»-tion for the union of democratic peoples as the nNeleec of world government which he conceived and ooftUoad...
...The same people lived under the League cnder the Union, they had the same leadership and the same rich resources...
...Hard dies the monarchial phantom in any clime...
...The trade union leaders and the Social Democracy will have te deal with the millions of older Germans who are now the Hitlerite bureaucracy...
...There are more of them...
...syBtera...
...Defeat and humiliation...
...Even when the dial was adopted, it did, of course, displace some operators but the kind,' generous, warm-hearted company immediately found something for them to do so as to keep them on the payroll...
...The recurrent reports of a generals' opposition to the Nazi leadership as well as those about a powerful monarchist movement in Germany are highly exaggerated, to say the least...
...We have seen, if we have eyes to see with, what this fundamental atavism of the caves can do when played upon by the financiers, as it was in Italy, and by the industrialists and Junkers, as it was in Germany...
...According to Dr...
...Yet practical unanimity about the end does not mean that we have a very clear idea of the best means to reach it...
...The Fourth Reich KJO amount of vehement hatred can hide the fact that the Nazi regime is the result of middle class upheaval which found wide support among the German people...
...This, however, would imply a political and economic subjugation of the Reich which could only result in most desolate internal conditions, conditions which, in the face of all safeguards, would inevitably iead to a popular revolution...
...4) ow\?m| Union postal system...
...After the war the democratic elements will have to reckon with millions of young Germans indoctrinated by Nazi education during the past eight years...
...the same forces bred Hitler and helped him into the saddle...
...Union of People, Not League of States, Can Bring Lasting Peace By Clarence Streit Former New York Times Geneva Correspondent fTAPITAL AND LABOR have a common interest in ^ the question of war or peace...
...The sobering and insistent fact is that exactly the same psychology plots and broods flj every country, including our own...
...of the land-owing Junker class...
...1920 and approximately but 200,000 today...
...They might then bring about that violent, anti-western and anti-democratic regime of National Bolshevism, which as an immediate outcome has become rather improbable in the course of the last few months...
...Three main prospects of how the Nazi regime could be removed in the course of the war can be envisaged...
...If a clear-cut and vivid picture of this peaceful and democratic Socialist Germany could be presented to tile German people now, it would provide the missing alternative to the Hitler regime...
...But the really perturbing aspect of the matter, so far as we in this country ar...
...Bolshevism...
...Unfortunately, or fortunately, if we take a longer view, the chances of a development along these lines do not appear to be great...
...The situation, in short, was such that people began to say the war for democracy had been a mistake...
...Let us have a chorus to go with him ?and after every speech like this wake the echoes and stir the heart bucolic with that grand old anthem: Hail...
...To revert this progress in the direction of orthodox private capitalism would be a fatal and most dangerous error...
...If it comes, it will only then be feasible for the military leaders to try to assume control—not, however, in order to make peace, but t?-^rally the people behind themselves in a desperate last effort to win the war...
...A tomb is a tomb no matter how expensive the materials that close you in...
...Of all sections of the German people the officer class hat, the least cause for dissatisfaction witlf the Nazi regime, ' which has strained and overstrained all national resources in order to provide it with the most formidable war machinery...
...The last is a popular revolution against the regime and its machinery of suppression...
...Ford's Sunday Evening Hour, a-gentleman from that well-known and un-beloved institution, the Telephone Trust, was going full steam ahead about the noble philanthropies and unselfish spirit of his corporation...
...3) our stable Union m«ney...
...of those disturbing social elements who would certainly thwart, by their material power, the peaceful evolution of German democracy, as they did after 1918...
...3 But the most curious reflection of all was still the ease with *Hhich the public was gypped by a device so palpable as the dial...
...It is high time we turned from a negative to a constructive approach and began to study this problem of organizing the government on which a lasting peace depends...
...Reports from Germany, differing in many a detail, agree on one point: the uncertainty about what might succeed the Nazi regime is one of the strongest safeguards of that regime...
...t Tney Say It at Hit Were True IJAVE you not sometimes marveled at the front, the smooth, *F~.polished, granitic front, with which the corporation lawyer hands out his "Booey...
...But we cannot avoid a bad peace simply by fighting or winning a war...
...DEWEY'S presidential speeches have been criticized by the unsympathetic as lacking in ideas, but the faultfinders have been aptly overwhelmed by the latest specimens of Dewey's oratory...
...But plainly, something different, some-fldng much more menacing, is involved here...
...Safe Between Tee Coasts YpUNG MR...
...Cliveden swarms with its victims...
...Hail...
...He criticized the plan for a "world union" conceived by former New York Times correspondent Clarence K. Streit, who'covered Geneva for years...
...There are more Pelleys and Mose-leya than are known by those names...
...It should, on the contrary, receive every possible assistance from the Socialist and democratic forces all over the world...
...to be free to live their own g lives, to think for themselves, to speak '1 as they like, to read what they like...
...Speak From The Knees IT APPEARS now that in both Norway and Denmark, the govern* ment had been in the bands of men that subscribed to the Short Circuit School of Thought, and as they believed nothing was worth fighting for they allowed the defense of each country to become broken-backed and impotent...
...A FTER years of tyrannical oppres-*^sion, of constant interference with their private lives, of unchecked exploitation, of untold hardships and privations, of perpetual stress and strain, of -feverish war preparations culminating in a hopeless war, the German people, f and chiefly the German workers, want & above all to live in peace and to be left 11 in peace...
...In so doing, they simply made their inter-state government a democracy—a government of, by and for the people, like that of every state in it, instead of a government or, by and for states, as in the league...
...Deed Men Can't Defend Themselves •THE plundered, water-logged and floundering American railroad * system, struggling...
...What the hell do we care...
...Of course, it could be argued that safeguards much stronger than those imposed at Versailles could prevent a resurrection of Germany's aggressiveness, regardiess of her internal regime...
...In addition, during the war and after, they have more to be taxed, mobilized and confiscated...
...we "cm hardly blame the Europeans alone for the present situs-tion since it was we who got them to adopt the league system which we had already proved would lead te these troubles—and then we carried the league system to Its extreme by carrying its doctrine of states' rights to the peak of isolationism and neutralism...
...In England it is possessed by a large and powerful group that has more than once influenced • the government to disastrous results...
...The fantastic old myth about the king and the persisting glamor of the Caesar, the weird throw-back to the Dark Ages...
...League law can only be enforced against armed, organized states—by war...
...Since each citizen had precisely tbe~T?g| control over the Union as over the state goverts*»»* 1 vote—no citizen of any state lost any power OT rifMl in making all these tremendous gains...
...i Whereupon Chairman O'Mahoney cut sharply in and read from le company reports to shdw that although business had greatly -.panded and increased meanwhile, the company had 304,000 em-•noyees in...
...fHE sons of trade unionists were quick to learn the * advantages of enduring peace...
...Have you not wondered at the ease with which he gets away with his startling economic novelties and even pushes them into circulatory beliefs...
...Then you will not be pained at an incident that happened the other day before the Federal Senate Committee investigating monopolies...
...It would give the German masses the strongest incentive to rise against their oppressors...
...And so they organized the League, of Friendship just as we did the League of Nations)" not" to secure individual rights but state rights—to secure each member state the right to have its own army, money, tariff...
...The former produces such systems as international law, diplomacy, alliances...
...no one knows on what fronts—whether in the air, on the ocean or on inland seas—the war will be won...
...The first is the conception of a "palace conspiracy," accompanied by a military coup, with the object of replacing- Hitler by either some less compromised and more compromising Nazi leader (Goering being the favorite for that role), or else by a representative of Big Business, like Thyssen or Schacht, or by one...
...Goebbeis were unable to achieve...
...Everywhere they exist and everywhere when democracy comes to grips they will be on hand making trouble for it...
...He was proceeding thus most prosperously, full steam ahead, when a quiet little woman thrust out a foot and . sept him sprawling...
...Gallup, in February of tEis year, ninety-seven per cent of the American people did not want to participate in the present war...
...They organized the kind of government that leagues always are—a government of states, by states, for states...
...They divided the- P**gjk government between the state* and the Union fell ment with a view to paining freedom thereby '*^!Bk selves...
...But that time they did not quit the struggle for it...
...They contain at least one idea that if it isn't strikingly, original is still concrete and definite...
...Denmark followed explicitly his doctrine of submission and is now ruined, materially, economically and spiritually...
...By organizing government by the people instead of states they overcame the inability of leagues to get agreement in time to be of service...
...As to the masses of the German people, however, their hope that bolsherist Russia would deliver them from the Nazi yoke was lost when Stalin became a friend of their oppressors...
...I ET us consider briefly the chances and the probable results of these three possibilities...
...Will the advance toward a better life for all here go on...
...Even if a rich man may come through a modern war relatively better off than a poor man, nevertheless hard experience has taught all of us that even those on the winning side risk everything in the economic depression and ¦ social upheaval that follow a modern major war...
...it reached its highest form in the League of Nations and can be called the league system...
...It would achieve the ousting of the Nazi regime with the least possible social upheaval, so they imagine...
...They would turn against the Nazis only if they had reason to think that the general hatred accumulated against Nazism was to become adverse to the war effort...
...With all the technique and the notable aplomb of Mr...
...now to keep afloat in the flood the robber barons of sixty years ago made for it, has introduced some novelties—streamlined trains, reclining chair cars, reduced rates, faster time...
...Only a Socialist reconstruction of Germany can possibly satisfy the needs of her people...
...An "astounding success...
...the only thing that changed Oil the form of government, from League to Union...
...It -will have to execute the legal dispossession of the heavy industrialists and of the Junkers, i.e...
...The latter leads to Federal Union...
...Will labor be able to retain even the advances it has made to date...
...Joseph C. Harsch, a staff correspondent .of the Christian Science Monitor, after a tour of observation in Denmark, writes of it that it is "a heart-broken country," and gives a harrowing account of the illimitable disasters that fell upon.it When it allowed itself to be gripped in the claws of the Hitler vulture...
...The discussion began with the articles of British labor leader Clement Attlee...
...Military occupation, dismemberment and foreign generals in place of native oppressors...
...The Reich people again face a crushing problem...
...IdoMM * freedom nourished, the eleven di&pute* were ¦¦ttnfi hard times irave way to prosperity, foreign trad* dee** rupled in ten years, money grew stable, and the UStea which beg-an with a debt cf $75.000,000 was soon tayla* off a surplus after buying Louisiana, Florida, paying for the War of 1812...
...The German people, without any tangible alternative to Hitler, continue their already shattered allegiance to the Fuehrer by default...
Vol. 23 • April 1940 • No. 17
