The Conditions for Peace
MARSHALL, CHARLES BURTON
The Conditions for Peace The Blowing Up of the Parthenon. By Salvador de Madariaga. Praeger. 93 pp. $2.95. Reviewed by Charles Burton Marshall Alumni Visiting Professor of International Studies,...
...It would internationalize all flying, set up a panel of technicians available to all free world countries, and "act as a regulator of all free operations in which capital and labor would not belong to the same flag...
...To these would be added a "Bank to be fed with surplus capital of its members for investment abroad so as to allow nations in need of capital to borrow it without political strings...
...The point is to make something good of it...
...This Bank should organize the internationalization of certain minerals essential to war—such as uranium and petrol...
...It is plain that the cause of the cold war has been weakened every step by British delusions over China...
...Like so many of us, de Madariaga sounds best when generalizing about courses to take and things to do...
...Those things we must correct...
...He wants a "permanent commission to watch over the working of political institutions" within the free world countries "to ensure that their citizens were free in the sense defined above...
...an independent judiciary...
...This is sound...
...An authority on a particular walk of life is one who has no need of another to tell him what is to be thought, said or done in that particular walk of life...
...We are not in a position to talk to the Russians at all...
...But, just as quack medicines are by no means a shortcut to health, so disarmament slogans are by no means shortcuts to peace...
...Now, fortunately, they are available in an American edition, expanded and updated...
...A product of long thought, will and effort was demolished by a moment's inadvertence...
...He looks for no windfalls in the form of a Peking-Moscow break...
...This is where authority must lead—and thereby presumably swallow itself, because the end result would be that everyone would have a hand in telling everybody else what to do about everything...
...Centuries hence excavators would burrow through mountains of red tape and find it quite intact...
...They have picked up a provocative title from an introductory account of an occurrence on September 26, 1687 when a Venetian bomb fell on a Turkish powder magazine and the Parthenon was destroyed—a result intended by no one...
...He expounds upon requisite moral qualities...
...freedom of opinion and association...
...Our Parthe non would not be blown up...
...Authority] rests on trust...
...That is not enough except for rats and tigers...
...and to administer current affairs . . . to forestall conflicts...
...Again, he says, "Peace, like health, is a magic word, and political quacks are as much aware of the value of the first as medical quacks of the value of the second...
...The thing to do is to improve and bind the free world...
...The foremost requirement of the free world is therefore integrity...
...freedom from arbitrary imprisonment...
...He wastes no time in eulogizing peace, pleading for negotiations with the adversary or urging world disarmament...
...as misleading as any Communist or Communist-planted slogan is apt to be...
...trust goes to integrity...
...We must keep clear distinctions between ourselves and the adversary: "We are gradually taking over some of the worst features of our enemies: their hero worship, their tendency to debase or even counterfeit verbal currency, their cynical disregard of anything but force...
...The world must be convinced that what the free world leaders say is what they mean...
...The slogan . . . is meant to make us forget that the persons with whom we should actually be dealing are not the Russian people, but precisely the persons who hold the Russian people in an immense concentration camp...
...The slogan . . . 'Let's talk to the Russians,'" he says, "is...
...to set up adequate institutions in order to safeguard against the breaking of the peace by unruly wills...
...The "free nations . . . might try to integrate their sovereign wills...
...This is the deep question in the author's mind in this brief essay of advice to the West's leaders in the cold war...
...He wants "a pithy but short set of practical rules" for internal freedom in every non-Communist country—"government by consent of the governed...
...A "condition for the recovery of the West is that all delusions about driving a wedge between Communist Russia and China be removed to that limbo where they belong...
...This calls for forgetting our anxiety about survival...
...The cold war represents the best option open to us...
...I noted with admiration his lectures on the cold war given a couple of years ago at Queens University, Belfast...
...Reviewed by Charles Burton Marshall Alumni Visiting Professor of International Studies, University of North Carolina Clarity and vivacity are the marks of Salvador de Madariaga's style...
...It "means originality...
...Authority, for example—a quality sadly dissipated by the United States since the high point at the time of the Marshall Plan...
...How to forefend this...
...We can only talk to the Communist bosses of the Russians, which is a quite different affair...
...It cannot be gained by following someone else's ideas or ways...
...Also a "commission to centralize, supervise and if need be cut off all trade with Communist countries...
...The prodigiousness of modern weapons points the same danger for all the world's good things...
...They might pool research, general staff, manufacture of armaments and organization...
...Everybody not on the other fellow's team is to pool almost everything...
Vol. 43 • November 1960 • No. 46
