Defending Freedom Without War

...But no less a man than Winston Churchill, not notably a pacifist, has declared the war which began in 1939 to have been the Unnecessary War...

...But the validity of that theory of defense depends on conditions, mainly psychological, that do not at present exist...

...The statesmen proved by what they did that they disbelieved, or failed to understand, what they said about peace being their first objective...

...All they had to do was submit to Hitler-who would probably have demanded the incineration of all British Jews, pacifists and liberals, and concentration camps for the Parliamentary opposition to his government of Fascist puppets...

...For his lifelong fight against war and militarism, Sir Norman Angell was knighted by King George V in 1931 and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933...

...300 years later, the still worse threat of Hitler's tyranny was defeated in the Battle of Britain by the prowess in the air of the Immortal Few...

...The wars of the 20th century have demonstrated that purposes which could once be achieved by military victory can no longer be achieved by that means, given the conditions of the modern world...

...But at the turn of the 20th century it should have been obvious that military power had lost that kind of effectiveness, unless used with a ruthlessness which Western peoples had become for the most part incapable of exercising...

...Any attempt to interfere is warmongering...

...We must, he said, introduce what are really the three Rs into education: reality, relatedness...

...The British people are today more prosperous than ever...

...Rather, we are dealing with spiritual forces within each of us, forces which on innumerable occasions have turned thousands of normal, decent citizens into a crowd of sadistic monsters, watching with relish the burning alive of some fellow creature for an unproved crime...

...With wearisome repetition, we have seen the events of this century determined not by the facts but by the way in which a collective psychology, public temper, has led us to interpret facts...

...There, unexamined emotion still blinds masses of men to the plainest facts, as demonstrated not merely by the drift to two world wars in one generation, both of them rendering more remote the objects for which they were fought, but equally by events in the internal history of a dozen nations West and East-Russia, Germany, Italy, France, Spain and China, to mention only a few...

...But while it is true that often we could not see the facts because we were angry, it is also true that we were angry because we could not see the facts...

...The only laboratory available is human society, and the material with which we must deal is not a micro-organism which can be seen under a microscope...

...If each was to be his own sole defender, then any potential aggressor a bit stronger than any single neighbor could apply to all of them "the simple and deadly plan of one by one" (another Churchill quotation) and make himself master of the whole...

...But that is not the only possible outcome of indifference to these forces of the human spirit...

...The question then becomes much more political and moral than military...

...Since possession of nuclear weapons by the groups on both sides of the Iron Curtain does not seem to have stood in the way of a certain decrease of tension, wherein lies the danger...

...Statesmen accept these warnings to the extent of avowing that in the "next war" there will be no victor...

...But freedom would have died...

...In his acceptance speech in 1916, he said that "no nation can any longer remain neutral as against any wilful disturbance of the peace of the world," and later he declared that the principle of neutrality had become completely obsolete as the basis of organized peace...

...Heretofore, we have tended to separate the problem of defense from the problem of peace...

...We of the West do well to remind ourselves always that the purpose of our power is not to forbid a people to embrace Communism, but to prevent them from committing military aggression...

...We may summarize by saying that, if the principle of deterrence is to work, there must be on the part of the potential aggressor a state of mind compatible with a rational estimate of the consequences of his acts...

...In his view, we should never have drifted into the position of having to choose between war and moral infamy...

...Peace" would be preserved...

...The First World War proved beyond doubt that there could be no effective national defense which was not in large measure collective: the cooperation of many nations for the defense of each...

...All the great powers of the world have acted upon that notion, with results which we know...

...The elaborate traffic codes which are indispensable now if the roads are to be safe are hardly a generation old...

...The deepest angers arise when there is a measure of truth and right on both sides (as perhaps in the Arab-Israel dispute...

...The voice of the people is the voice of God" -that is to say, the mass mind can do no wrong...

...Which is pretty much what Hitler did to Continental Europe in the early period of World War II...

...for in that case Moscow and Peking will "retaliate in advance" with the object of bringing about such destruction in the West as to render it incapable of effective military action...

...Concerning which, this must first be noted: In the past, we have been able to afford these orgies of hate and violence in the sense that we survived them...

...It includes defense of the rights of the individual as against an ever-increasing state authority, rights which can so easily be sacrificed in efforts to defend the nation against alien assault...

...The House thereupon passed a bill against "blasphemy and profaneness," citing Hobbes's Leviathan as an example of those offenses...

...The "peace-loving nations," we are told, should band together against the warmongers (who for the Russians are the Capitalists and for the Capitalists are the Russians...

...For of course Britain reverted to neutrality and isolationism just as did the United States...

...The question involves more than merely "national" defense...

...But our educational preparation for social life takes little account of the vast changes in politics wrought by such developments as the annihilation of distance and the increased interdependence of functions...

...Life and progress go on...

...it might be quite true...

...He must not, that is, be so dominated by doctrinal fanaticism, nationalist delirium or "righteous indignation" as to damn all consequences...

...Among his score of other books are The Story of Money (1929), Preface to Peace (1935), Let the People Know (1943) and The Steep Places (1948...

...Christianity and Mohammedanism waged war against each other for generations...

...What we want first is defense-security...

...We have managed to shed the fears and angers which prompted our forebears (not only in New England) to burn old women for having by witchcraft caused a plague or epidemic...

...It amounted, I suggested, to this: When two nations or groups are likely to quarrel, the way for both to be secure and keep the peace is for each to be stronger than the other...

...Said most of the public: "Japan is invading China, Italy conquering Ethiopia, Hitler marching into the Rhineland??what earthly concern is that of ours...

...The collective hallucinations which put our freedom and security in such jeopardy are as universal as were once the hallucinations behind witchcraft and the fears and ferocious cruelties connected therewith...

...The means by which this ancient truth could and should be applied to nations was indicated by Woodrow Wilson...

...If, it is argued, the Soviets know that the use of nuclear weapons against any one of the Western Allies will be met by instant retaliation from the others-a retaliation which would involve Moscow's annihilation??then no such attack will be made...

...and in the following years Congress passed Neutrality Acts more ferocious in their isolationism than anything previously known in American legislative records...

...In the past, the assumption has usually-been justified...

...Thereupon, the witchcraft hallucinations, with the accompanying angers, fears and hates, just disappeared...

...In 1920, the electorate repudiated Wilson and all his works...

...To the driver of the covered wagon, they would have been incomprehensible...

...Yet, decision will rest with laymen- in parliaments, congresses, boards of education...

...A quarter of a century later when Clemenceau and Wilson had been proven true prophets...

...But that leaves out of account the nuclear weapon...

...On behalf of this objective, we have readily sacrificed peace and gone to war...

...Adozen physicists of the first rank have warned us that if nuclear weapons are used in the next war, as Allied commanders have told us bluntly they will be, both sides run the risk of complete extermination...

...There would be nothing inevitable about it, any more than the passions which would have provoked that outcome are inevitable, however much they are part of human nature...

...If it came after a period of jitters, of disputes that had raised deep angers, a false report might be believed as readily as a true one...

...For a year or two, the greater part of the American public agreed...

...Most educationists know this...

...Thomas Hobbes...

...15 or 20 years...

...whether of a sixteenth-century St...

...But the advance of Western peoples in willingness to examine facts realistically in such matters as sanitation is not matched by an equal advance in the field of politics...

...How, then, do we defend ourselves without war...

...What is to be our instrument of defense, when arms can no longer be used, against the Hitlers and the Stalins of the future...

...Only instant destruction of his installations can save us...

...Wilson had seen the point of the argument used to him by Clemenceau: "If now in this year 1918 your country says plainly that it will defend France if she is once more the victim of invasion by Germany, it won't have to do it...

...responsibility...

...An American educationist summed it up in three words...

...Such a report might be quite false...

...Catholicism fought Protestantism...

...In our efforts to organize effectively for resistance, we may bit by bit so sacrifice the freedom of the individual that there remains little difference between individualist and Communist society...

...Failing such a declaration, the United Slates will be compelled one day again to send its sons to die abroad, a fate your country could avoid by the clear commitment for which I am asking...

...Yet, both sides keep and develop nuclear weapons on the theory that, though "there ain't gonna be no war" (as a British Foreign Secretary assured us), possession of such weapons will act as a deterrent to "the other side.'' If military force is to be ruled out in the future, what can replace it as an instrument of ultimate defense against the alien aggressor or the domestic oppressor...

...Indeed, we retain an 18th-century political ethos which by implication denies that there is any need to discipline collective emotion...

...Two or three bombs of the type the Russians already possess, dropped over Britain, would extinguish human life there...

...The French schoolboy is taught that the tyrannies of the Old Regime were wiped away by the military power of the French people...

...It has long been assumed as an axiom of statecraft that victory in war means greater power to insure the national interest...

...Every American schoolboy is taught that his country was born of war, revolutionary war against a tyrant king, and that the Union so formed was held together against secessionist slave-holders by war...

...In Britain, the reversion was called appeasement...

...I asked if he would give that advice to Germany...

...Both religions survived...

...When the most literate and learned nation in the world handed its destinies over to an Austrian ignoramus and acquiesced in unspeakable abominations, we explained the phenomenon by saying that there is some special quality in Germans and Germanic peoples-conveniently forgetting what had happened in Italy and what has happened so often in France in the way of paralysis of democratic government, while also forgetting that we English are a Teutonic people...

...Is this all too remote and distant to hear on so urgent a problem as the advance of Moscow in Asia and Africa...

...The end will then be the use of the H-bomb and mutual extinction...

...The hallucinations and misconceptions which the Hitlers, Lenins, Mussolinis and lesser demagogues in every nation exploit to such evil purpose cannot be dispelled by a simple laboratory demonstration...

...And the English schoolboy is taught that his parliamentary institutions were defended against the threat of Stuart absolutism by the power of Cromwell's armies...

...The British could have had peace in 1914...

...If the old passions remain undiminished, producing first massacre, then counter-massacre on a larger scale, then counter-counter-killings (the Arab-Israel struggle abundantly illustrates that kind of progression), the end will be the readiness of a whole community to commit suicide rather than restrain an ungovernable passion of retaliation...

...For 12 years, Sir Norman was on the Council of the Royal Institute of International Affairs...

...The chances are that the problem will still be with us in 10...

...The defeat of the Spanish Armada did in fact insure the expansion of England in the New World: the defeat of France in Canada and the Ohio, and later the defeat of Napoleonic France, did insure that the political system of the original 13 states should expand to the Pacific Coast...

...All they had to do was allow Hohenzollern Germany to become the dominant power of Europe and thereby threaten Britain's defenses...

...The sort of emotion which we have seen displayed in international politics during this century deprives men-especially when gathered into crowds, masses, "herds"??of the capacity for objective and rational judgment...

...Britain fought and for a time bore the main brunt of two world wars...

...When Lenin's demagogy was able to destroy a liberal government and replace it by a tyranny far worse than the Tsar's, we evaded the obvious lesson by saying that the event was made possible only by the illiteracy of the Russian masses...

...The British preferred war as the only available alternative (in the circumstances into which they had allowed their country to drift) to the utter destruction of all decency and humanity...

...Of course, in the end the very principles of foreign commitment so long evaded were adopted...

...At the moment, the Western powers are answering the question of defense with one word: deterrence...

...Even if after such a performance Britain's allies managed to do something similar to Russia, that would not constitute "defense" for a population already dead or dying...

...One side or the other gets a report from its "intelligence" to this effect: "We have absolutely reliable information that the enemy will strike tomorrow at dawn...

...The problem of peace is that of finding means of defense other than war...

...The purpose of the social sciences should be to give a better understanding of human nature, of the nature of society, and of the indispensable conditions of determining truth...

...Yet, the outstanding fact of recent history is that nearly everybody wanted peace-and went to war...

...The development of understanding and of skill in the interpretation of evidence should be regarded as more important than the acquisition of examinable knowledge...

...But the agreement was momentary...

...Of British opinion as of American, it can be said that if it had recognized and applied early (when their application was relatively easy) the truths which were recognized late (when their application had become both difficult and dangerous), vast and incalculable misery would have been avoided...

...A committee of the House of Commons, reporting on the Plague and the Fire of London, ascribed those disasters to the impieties of Mr...

...He is the author, of course, of The Great Illusion, first published in 1908 and since then reprinted and translated into twenty languages...

...The lunacy of such an approach was made all the greater by the fact that it was, and is, impossible to say whether a country is adequately armed until we know with what allies and against what enemy it will have to fight...

...America had for the second time been compelled to send its boys to fight in France, and the Second World War had produced as one result the immense expansion of Communism throughout the world??Wilson's principles were reintroduced by Truman...

...And today's children will be the voters and rulers 10, 15 or 20 years hence...

...More than one competent scientist has declared that such a war, if it came, might prove the end of the human race...

...But the Senate and the electorate would listen to no such argument and refused ratification of the treaty with France which Wilson had initialed...

...The next step would be virtual amalgamation...

...And he must be able to read the mind and intentions of the other side...

...war did not destroy German militarism, end all war, or make the world safe for democracy, Instead, it produced another war within a generation, form of German militarism more dangerous than that of 1914 and the retreat of democracy throughout hall the world...

...3. The Communist peoples of Europe and Asia must never get the idea that the real purpose of Western power-is to deprive them of the right to maintain a Communist society if they so desire...

...produced other results which are now compelling us to rearm her...

...If a third world war follows the second, the demonstration that victory can no longer insure defense will be a matter not of years but of hours...

...Bartholomew's Day massacre of Protestants, or of an eighteenth-century massacre of political rivals under the aegis of a crowned Goddess of Reason presiding over a Revolutionary Terror, or a mass extermination of Jews sanctioned by Protestants and Catholics alike...

...To that end...

...If some improvement in political judgment is to be brought about, education must be consciously reshaped and some of its traditional values revised...

...or have caused great masses of a highly cultured Christian nation to regard with indifference the planned extermination of millions of men, women and children for the crime of being members of the race to which Jesus Christ, His Mother and His Apostles all belonged...

...Had the American public been prepared to adopt under Wilson the degree of internationalism it accepted under Truman, and had Britain also learned the real lessons of the first war, there would have been no second one...

...What is the relevance of this history of past error to our present problems...

...Isn't the defense of the West now organized on a collective basis and aren't the old prejudices on that score abating...

...The necessary conditions include at least these three: 1. Moscow must really be convinced that attack on any one of the Western Allies will involve retaliation by the others, that the West is now so united that its defense has become truly collective, that common action against attack will no longer be frustrated by the influence of, say, the powerful Communist parties in France and Italy, or by a revived isolationism...

...The 1914...

...anthropology and psychology should be made a part of history, elementary economics a part of the curriculum in all schools, and the school children of the non-Communist world made as familiar with the case for freedom of discussion presented by Locke and Mill as are the children of the Communist world with the contrary case presented by Marx and Lenin...

...Consider a quite possible contingency...

...2. The Communist powers must never get the idea, however mistakenly, that the Western alliance is about to attack...

...Both forms of Christianity remain with us...

...All civilization rests on the management of human nature and on the changing of human behavior into something that makes orderly society possible...

...From these facts has resulted a general feeling: "These wars, expensive and bloodthirsty as they are, don't really matter much in the long run...

...Complete victory in a Boer War waged to insure British predominance in the two small Boer Republics did not have the intended result: indeed, the defeated Boer-asserted their predominance over the whole of South Africa...

...The implication on both sides is that there are some who want peace and some who don't, and that when all nations want peace we shall get it...

...The nature and extent of the management necessarily increase with the growing complexity of social organization...

...In the 60 years during which I have participated in discussions of international affairs, the most frequent declaration I have heard from statesmen is that their principal aim is to maintain peace...

...We get war not because men disagree as to the desirability of peace, but because they disagree on what constitutes defense for a nation and how it may be achieved...

...The issue goes well beyond that of the League and involves the whole basis of American foreign policy...

...In other words, it is not true that what we want most is peace, the absence of war...

...But the biologist, by relatively simple demonstration of physical fact, was able to show that the great pestilences, like the Plague of London or Black Death, were caused by lice and rats, not witches or angry devils...

...They could have had peace in 1939...

...The second war, which did succeed in disarming Germany...

...Our failure to prove adequate to our problems is not due to qualities peculiar to any single nation...

...Most laymen do not...

...They cannot be separated...

...Early in this century, just as the arms race between Britain and Germany was beginning, an eminent British statesman told us that the one way for a country to be secure was to be so much stronger than the potential enemy that he would not dare attack...

...The very fact that these phenomena are so ancient and so universal is commonly taken as justification for ignoring the whole thing on the ground that it is quite obviously "part of human nature" and "you cannot change human nature...

...These phenomena are coterminous with the whole of human history, whether taking the form of the burning of heretics as an Act of Faith, or of the burning of Negroes to prove the superior culture of the white man...