SHORTEN THE WAR!
Meeman, Edward J.
Shorten The War! By EDWARD J. MEEMAN WE CAN shorten the war. We can save hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of lives. We can mitigate the damage which war inevitably does to civilization and...
...We won't be able to feed them indefinitely, and we're too decent to let them starve...
...We'll encourage them to recover industrially, for it will be necessary to the world's health and our health to do so...
...you can't make any distinction between the German people and the Nazis...
...We had come to see that war was destructive of civilization and democracy...
...The Germanic element, thru the Anglo-Saxons whose ancestors came from England, and those whose ancestors came directly from Germany, constitute a major and not unwholesome portion in the melting pot that is America...
...The German stock is a fusion of all the peoples around them—Scandinavians, Slavs, Alpines, Franks (French), and Dutch...
...Hitler has lost the war...
...The German people, they say, are devilish...
...To those who are skeptical, and will say that the Nazis could not dominate if the majority did not want them, he will point to American cities, where, even though the processes of democracy are well established, political bosses such as Huey Long and Frank Hague can for years dominate in violation of all civil liberties—certainly we will not admit that such regimes are the free, voluntary, considered choice of any American community...
...Not propaganda, which beguiles...
...Let us work on the hypothesis that the majority of Germans do not want Hitler and the Nazis...
...Write to President Roosevelt...
...Hitler made war with the idea of aggrandizing Germany and himself...
...Let us know that we have weapons more powerful than bombs to win the peoples of Germany and her satellite countries back into Atlantic liberal civilization, where the strength and industry of those peoples are needed...
...but through war he has brought ruin to Germany and assured his own downfall...
...Write to your Senators and Representatives in Congress...
...The Anglo-Saxons, the dominant strain of the people of England and the British Commonwealth of Nations, were Germans who came from the heart of Germany, and their cousins remain at the heart of Germany...
...We had come to believe that war, being murder on a. wholesale scale, was a sin in the light of our Jewish and Christian faith, a violation of the Ten Commandments and the Gospel of Love...
...By offering humane and just peace terms to the masses of democratically-minded people in Axis and occupied countries which will draw them to our side, make them our allies in war, and, when the war is over, our friends, bulwarks of the permanent order of peace...
...Yet many Germans who hate Nazism fight on, because they fear what will happen to them if they quit...
...Finally we had come to see that war was not-only destructive and wrong, but that it was the most uncertain means a nation could employ...
...As we wage war on Hitler and the Nazis, let us say in terms that will be convincing that the German nation as a whole and any individual decent German, will not suffer if they lay down their arms...
...Why do we say things that we do not really mean and will not carry out...
...A Practical Way We can win these Germans to our side, if we will only be honest enough with ourselves to face the fact that we are a decent, merciful, sensible people, and tell the Germans in strong and convincing terms, ceaselessly reiterated, that our only object is to bring their country back into the family of law-abiding nations...
...Let those peoples know that if they surrender to us, the innocent will not be punished, but only the guilty leaders...
...We can accomplish these things by employing a weapon cheaper, finer, and more powerful than any made with hands: moral warfare...
...Or they turn to Stalin, who has already indicated that he does not share the program of his more civilized Allies for the dismemberment and impoverishment of a great nation and the injury of babies yet unborn...
...But despite our disillusionment with war, war came to us, and we are in it...
...Write to Secretary of State Cordell Hull...
...When his armies failed to break through in Egypt and Russia, when it was seen that the vast pincers would never meet in Asia, it became certain that Hitler would not succeed in dominating Europe...
...that he had forced himself on them by tricks, propaganda, and force...
...You couldn't reduce 80,000,000 skillful people to an agrarian economy, or limit them to making 10-cent store trinkets...
...By dissipating the miasma of war psychology which conflict always creates...
...He will look at her central position in Europe, surrounded as she is by other peoples, as a circumstance that begot fears of invasion, which, overcompensated, led to her putting her trust in arms with which to "do it to them first...
...It is our faith that Truth, Justice, and Love are supreme realities, and that the human heart will give a deeper, stronger, and more enduring response to these than to lies, force, and hatred...
...German Stock Is A Fusion There are some people on our side who are perfectly willing to use this appeal to Bulgarian, Rumanian, Hungarian, and Finnish peoples, in order to detach them from Hitler, but not to the German people...
...By revealing, in the clear air of reason, the truth about human nature and human society which was so obvious to us in the former peacetime, will be clear to us in the next peacetime, but if seen now, can bring an end to the world's torment...
...How do we wage moral warfare...
...We can mitigate the damage which war inevitably does to civilization and to democracy...
...War, once loosed, became uncontrollable, and took directions unplanned by those who waged it...
...Mussolini seemed to be quite acceptable to the Italian people...
...For the German nation, the central nation of Europe, is a composite of European races...
...War is in all respects wasteful and tragic, but the most wasteful phase is the lag between the decision of the outcome, and surrender...
...it will pay us...
...He will see that it is not the German stock which must be destroyed, but the ideas which have governed them, and the forces which those ideas have let loose...
...More Powerful Than Bombs We of the western democracies had come to a profound disbelief in war...
...The scientist will not say that there is anything wrong with the German stock...
...When we have removed the threat to our national safety, then we must recall our pre-war conviction that war is not the most efficacious means of attaining our objectives, and emphasize other means . . . moral ideas...
...We can make the sequel order and enduring peace...
...This is a democracy and those who represent you will not fail to give heed to what you have to say to them...
...It is not surprising, that engrossed in war, and steamed up with a war psychology, we should have failed to notice that the present war is confirming our former judgments as to its unreliability as an instrument of policy...
...It is a hard saying, but true, that when a nation which is attacked fails to employ any moral or legitimate diplomatic means which might shorten the war, that nation then shares the guilt of adopting the cult of the belief in violence...
...Let us avoid reducing Europe to rubble, fit only to be inhabited by rats—lest, indeed, we make rats of humanity...
...Suggested Message To Germans Since it is German ideas that must be destroyed and not Germans, he will not overlook the prime usefulness of ideas as the means of that destruction...
...We can prevent the war from ending in disorder and "deepening confusion...
...We can reduce the amount of the vast debts which war cost is imposing on our future...
...Mussolini, by making war, has lost his empire and is through...
...He will look at her late arrival at nationhood and greatness, which also gave her an inferiority complex with relation to other powers, and led her to irrational and mad ideas as to how to achieve equality...
...Let us, by moral warfare, shorten the war, and avoid destruction of young lives and ancient structures, both precious...
...If the German people are damned by the nature of their blood, then all Europe is damned...
...Not "psychological" warfare, which adds to the confusion...
...There are a vast number of people in Allied countries who are clamoring for the dismemberment and de-industrialization of Germany—two drastic things which we won't do when the time comes, because they are impractical...
...The whole task of the Allies now is not to win—for we won long ago—but to bring about the surrender of the Germans...
...Yet our invasion made it instantly clear that a majority did not want him...
...He lost it when he failed to prevent American occupation of North Africa and when he failed to capture Stalingrad...
...it seemed that only a small minority were opposed...
...What is it that distinguishes us from the totalitarian unbelievers...
...We can cut down the irremediable waste and world-wide dispersion of our natural resources, which, if unchecked, may reduce this nation to a second-rate power...
...We had come to see that World War I had spawned bolshevism, fascism, and moral breakdown...
...If you believe this is a practical way to shorten the war and assure a just and lasting peace, there is a simple, practical way by which it is not impossible to get the policy adopted...
...But moral warfare, which brings misled or erring enemy peoples to their senses and makes them fit to be citizens of the world again—our world...
...But this is a conception which we did not hold in the normal thinking of peacetime and one which, it is safe to say, we shall not hold when the norm of peace returns...
...Let us send our statesmen a mighty demand that they wage moral warfare...
...We only prolong the war, and injure our standing in the world...
...that every day the war is prolonged they hurt us, but hurt themselves more...
...Let us be true to that faith, and if we are, our governments will be...
...With the exactitude that science demands, he will note that a majority of Germans never voluntarily voted for Hitler, and that a majority never wanted war...
Vol. 7 • October 1943 • No. 42
