AS THE CROW FLIES
Meyer, Ernest L.
As the Crow Flies By ERNEST L. MEYER WHAT is an isolationist? More and more, as the arena of war has widened, the word has come to take on a cartain stigma. In some quarters, especially among...
...We submit to the calm common sense of mankind (when free from the sentimental balderdash of war) that the isolationist is he who would bolt and bar himself and his country away from his neighbors, by piling up armament, bombs and poison, and spending the money hungry children need for tools to kill foreigners with...
...Isolationism, on the contrary, is narrow, exclusive...
...Nor is her redefinition of the loosely-used term isolationist merely an exercise in agility...
...We peace makers, for whom the Latin word is pacifist, are in no sense of the word isolationists, nor are those men and women in public life such when they express our point of view...
...its religion is nationalism and its crutch on which it walks perennially to disaster is armaments...
...it is based on fear or contempt of one's neighbors...
...It is rooted in ascertainable fact...
...Miss Cleghorn, it seems to me, has made a contribution to the current debate as terse as it is profound...
...And her simple manifesto should be broadcast to all those who promote the fevers of war, who believe that force and hate can best be obliterated by adding more force and hate, and who feel with a logic as fatuous as it is fatal that things are in such a bad state that they can be improved only by making them worse...
...In some quarters, especially among those who clamor for intervention, the word has come to be coupled with concepts like cowardice, or a blind refusal to face the realistic facts, or a selfish unwillingness to help make the world safe for the civilized It has rcninlned ior Cleghoni to throw new light on a debate that will be waged in the United States with increasing bitterness in the coming months...
...There is nothing isolationist in the great religions, whether sprung from the precepts of a Christ or a Confucius, for their moral, appeal is all-embracing...
...In a letter printed in the Herald Tribune last Sunday...
...Miss CJeghorn wrote from her home in Vermont: "May I ask for some care and thought in the use of the word 'isolationists...
...and not those who humbly try to remind their fellow sinners that they should be neither Jew nor Greek, barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free, but ail are one in the God who is love...
...The most un-isolalionist people I know are the Quakers, who never armed in the early days, who lead in peacemaking now, and whom the promoters and prolongers of European wars and suspicions kerp busy binding up the wounds of war victims and rebuilding the waste places the war-making governments create...
...We want mutual confidence, comradeship, unfortified frontiers, federation, freedom of trade, world apportionment of raw materials...
...We want friendships, not battleships...
...If the isolationists—the real isolationists—had their way, each nation would be domed under a vast and impregnable sheet of steel through which citizens, climbing to peepholes, would cast apprehensive glances at the skies and then go scrambling down again, and scatter ominous warnings of an impending invasion from Mars...
...I hope those who do the isolating of nations from brotherly love will be called by their true names, isolationists...
Vol. 10 • May 1940 • No. 20
