Where the News Ends

...The Japanese will soon hsve reason to draw similar rornparis< n...

...Freedom of speech and religion, freedom from want end fear do not and cannot flourish in an atmosphere of total mobilisation for war and gigantic armaments...

...The new militarism for America is supported by arguments that were stale and exploded when I was a boy...

...One of the last published articles of the lste Secretary of the Navy, Colonel Frank Knox, was an appeal for permanent peacetime conscription, Knox suggested that the United States, by adopting this policy, would demonstrate that "at the drop of anyone's hat the United States will be ready to jump in, at close to peak strength, to knock out any power or combination of powers which threatens our national aecurity...

...Still more recently Clare Booth* Luce noted that after Teheran, that most mysterious of international conferences, the unknown results of which the Communists want us to sdore, Mrs...

...The event may well prove to be of mstorie importance...

...And as a means of reducing unemployment the remedy would be distinctly worse then the disease...

...The old American Labor Party wag by its very nature a state party...

...Every child must have a fair break Health and education and a chance for productive employment must be open to all...

...It will, occasionally, support old-party candidates who stand for its program...

...But usually it will have its own ticket...

...Why crime would be diminished by teaching people homicide on a large scale is a pcser for me...

...Promotion of health is one of the obsolete weapons in the militarists' armory of arguments...

...Wha our militarists are perhaps unconsciously doing is proposing the sacrifice of one of the most important elements in the American way of life, freedomfrom militarist organization except under the pressing necessity of actual war...

...Whatever reforms either of these parties champion will be too little and too late...

...Their contention that the only way to make a young man healthy is to train him to kill or maim, be killed or he maimed would be funny if it were not accented so widely and so credulously...

...More than a thousand delegates from all sections of the Empire State will be considering the make-up, principles and platform of tha organisation...

...It aims not to be just a new bargaining group, another balance of power...

...When this war is finished we must somehow tackle and somehow solve the root problems of our national end international life...

...It is the alternative to the sort of misery which we have known during the recent depression...

...Society as a whole acting through local snd federal agencies will have to play a greater part To play their part individual citizens must hsvs s more even distribution of medical, social and educational services...

...CERTAINLY such a sacrifice should not be made, except under the compulsion of overwhelming necessity...

...If this is not won the foar freedoms are likely to remain little more than a pious aspiration...

...So strong is the libertarian spirit in tha Dominions that Canada, Australia and South Africa do not conscript their citizens for service outside their territorial limits...

...The Moscow Conference adopted a resolution on this subject, phrased in considerably weaker terms...

...The idea has been widely accepted and legislation to implement it is pending in Congress...

...We now take for granted that all of ua together, acting through our government, are responsible for the individual's ehsnee to work and live...

...Roosevelt came out for universal military training in the United States...

...Very often the reverse is the case...

...It is proposed to build a genuinely new party for Americana who want to go forward as rapidly as possible...

...To advocate postwar American militarism now is nothing short of defeatism...

...The New Liberal Party WhEN this issue of The New Leader is unfolded by its readers, the initial convention of New York's newest party will be in session...

...Jj^S a matter of historical record, democracy has functioned most consistently and effectively in the lands where conscription has only been resorted to in war emergencies, in the United States, in Great Britain and in the self-governing Dominions...

...Universal military service would be "democratic"—the same stupidly untrue contention that is being used in an effort to bolster up nagging sentiment for'forced labor...

...Either we must put life on an even keel with an expsnding economy or we shall periodically face such strains snd dangers ss we have recently passed through...

...Its policy of trading, jockeying and serving as balance of power helped achieve some good results...

...It means planning for industry, agriculture and transportation...

...We should spare no effort by example and diplomatic representation to bring about a drastic limitation of armaments all over the world after the Axis powers have been defeated and disarmed...

...It will support President Roosevelt and Senator Wagner in the coming campaign, but it was not formed fbr that limited purpose...

...One could not have mobilized a corporal's guard of sentiment, in the United States or anywhere else, for attacking a peaceful Japan that was observing its treaty obligations...

...What would be more natural, and more logical, from their standpoint, than to try to build up their fighting power to a point where they cculd knock us out...

...Ask any German in the 'rombed ruins of Berlin and Hamburg when he was more secure, in the demilitarized Weimar Republic, which no one thought of attacking, or in the super-militarized Third Reich...

...Now this same proposition that an augmentation of aggressive power makes for insecurity, rather than fcr security, will begin to work against us if, in the postwar world, we should begin to throw our weight about, ready "to knock out any power or combination of powers which threatens our national security...

...Stslin does not seem to have revived Litvinov's proposals in this direction...

...This is, to typical Americans, no longer s fanciful dream...

...It involves going beyond the New Deal...

...There is need of s party which knows its mind and is willing to move with all posaible speed...

...More adequate clinical facilities, especially in tha country districts, an expanded public health program and voluntary sport participation would be far more effective means of promoting national health than military training, which, by the test of recent experience, has given us a bed crop of nervous breakdowns and mental cases...

...No one can expect the Republican or the Democratic Party to face up to it The Republicans include many of the conservative industrial groups...

...Paradoxical as it may seem, a nation's security does not increase in automatic proportion as it multiplies weapons of death and destruction...

...The Democrats take in s lot of corrupt urban political machines in the North and a large number of reactionary mossbacks in the South...

...will be open for the realisation of the four freedoms...

...For this phrase, as it stands, suggests that we are to be the sole judges of cur own security, and of who may be threatening it But this is the road to anarchy, to bigger and more disastrous wars...

...If the new party lives op to the ambitions of its founders, such limitations will not hedge it in...

...It foresees the issues which must be faced during the coming generation...

...This is our national problem...

...When this is won the wa...

...A streamlined, militarized America would no longer be the America of which Jefferson and Thoreau and Lincoln and Mark Twain and Walt Whitman and William Allen White and other carriers of the humane, peaceloving, democratic American tradition dreamed...

...Some of the most brutal criminals of the Fascist and Nazi regimes have been ex-soldiers who were never able to snap out of the psychology of killing, who could never readjust themselves to normal peaceful life...

...The new Liberal Party will adopt a platform covering all the essential points with which the nation must deal...

...It looks to the future...

...The Liberal Party will for the first time give millions of Intelligent and forward looking citizens a place where they can meet and work toward their solution...

...This Is implicitly recognised in the last point of the Atlantic Charter, which expresses the belief that "all of the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment of the use of force" and promises "aid and encouragement" to "all other practicable measures which will lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of armaments...

...It waa designed to serve a need In the Now York City and Stats situation...

...But it waa hardly for export beyond state boundaries...

...Individual initiative will need far more encouragement than it has had during recent periods of trust restrictions...

...A stable peace is our only genuine stake in the war, tha only solid benefit we can reasonably expect by participating in battles by land and sea and air thousands of miles away from our own hemisphere...

...American showing in the Olympic Games and in other international sport competition has certainly not justified the conclusion that our health standards have been inferior to those of the traditionally militarized countries of continental Europe...

...If one or more than one of the powers with which we are associated should stubbornly reject all reasonable suggestions for agreed limitation of armaments, tehen, and only then, we should be obliged, with bitterness and reluctance, to consider increasing our own military establishments...

...The late Secretary Knox was by no means the only advocate of postwar conscription...

...It pledged consultation among the United Nations for the' purpose of "regulation of armament- " Significantly and discouragingly, there is no suggestion of all-around disarmament, or even of drastic reduction of armaments...

...But this should be our last step, not our first...

...These are national problems: We need a new party, not only in New York State, but in all 48 states...

...Peacetime conscription would be such an important departure from our former policy, it would be such a confession of defeat in regard to our main rational objective in the present war, the establishment of stable peace, that its necessity should certainly be subjected to close and critical examination...

...The great productive machinery of the nation is no longer regarded as something outside our control, something run by nature or the devil, which may now and then throw millions of us out of work without our being able to do anything about it But evening up opportunity means a good deal of change...

...It requires expanding industry, expanding markets, expanding purchasing power and consumption...

...Suppose some power, or group of powers, should conceive the idea that we were threatening their security...

...Equally baseless are militarist suggestions that compulsory military training would diminish crime and reduce unemployment...

...T*HIS is a pretty thinly disguised formula for the proposition that America could and should boss the world...

...Since the New Deal days moat of us hsve accepted • revolutionary principle...