PEACE-ALICE IN WONDERLAND VERSION
Barnes, Harry Elmer
The Progressive's Bookshelf Peace—Alice In Wonderland Version CAN WE WIN THE PEACE? by D. F. Fleming. Broadman Press. $1. KEEP THE PEACE THROUGH AIR POWER, by Allan A. Michie. Henry Holt....
...He does not apply this same logic to the more than 80 per cent of the American people who voted resolutely against war in all the polls up to Pearl Harbor and then joined lustily in supporting the war...
...Did their biological nature change between 1935 and 1940...
...What Mr...
...Fleming, most of the world disasters since 1918, including World War II, have been mainly a result of our failure to join the League of Nations...
...Michie agrees with Vice President Wallace and others that Germany must be educated back to civilization...
...We may cogently inquire what good this will do, in the light of the American example...
...Wilson in 1919-1920...
...We were admittedly a peace-loving people already, but failed to check the not more than twenty-five men who led us to World War II...
...Prof...
...Prof...
...Fleming does not tell us that the League failed to handle the problems which it had the power to deal with...
...It is a convenient summary of most of the errors and misrepresentations which must be cleared away before we can hope to work intelligently for peace...
...Michie in his account of the nature of the Treaty of Versailles and the reasons for the rise of Hitler...
...But when authors, columnists, and commentators falsify books and script and cause the loss of billions of dollars and millions of lives they get appointed to State Departments, or land soft and lushly paying jobs with the most powerful publishing organizations and newspapers and the leading radio chains...
...The book is mainly a diatribe against Germany and the Germans and an argument for a brutal peace to be enforced by overwhelming Allied air power indefinitely extended...
...Fleming's handling.of the League, the alleged results of our failure to join, and its relation to world history since Versailles, while shared by many in-*ellectuals, is not really worthy of Alice or "Little Audrey...
...There is no inkling of the more recent information that Wilson's stubbornness was mainly responsible for our failure to join and that Lodge was willing to meet Wilson considerably more than half way...
...According to Prof...
...This may be true, but it has little to do with the present book...
...It is chiefly valuable as an anthology of the sputterings and spleen of the Vansittarts, Shirers, Ni-zers, et al...
...Nor does the key to the windiless and naivete of this book...
...But neither air power nor any other power can enforce peace unless peace is associated with some degree of justice and historical realism and unless the nations which have the air power wish peace...
...Fleming's treatment of the causes of war and possible ways of eliminating them is sound enough, but when he comes to the specific responsibility for this second World War and the manner in which peace can be brought out of it he once more immerses himself completely in the mythology which will have to be dispelled before we can have any hope of peace for this country or the world...
...Roosevelt would probably not have spent much of anything for destruction if Republican and other economic royalists had not blocked his program of perpetuating his regime on the basis of domestic achievements and successes...
...The doctrines which dominate this book would assure a third and more terrible world war within 15 years if they were made the basis of the "peace" structure...
...If Britain can entice and coax us to fight her great impending war against Soviet Russia to preserve the British Empire, then air power can be the instrument of another and more terrible war rather than an agency to maintain peace...
...The author correctly and appropriately praises the constructive domestic reforms of Wilson and Roosevelt, but he overlooks the fact that their foreign policies brought disasters to the country which appallingly outweighed any benefits of their domestic policies—about comparable to burning down an orphan asylum at midnight after having thrown a bone to a hungry dog...
...Fleming goes to the root of the matter when he observes that: "We can afford any amount of money for destruction, but there is still strong opposition to spending money for public welfare, or for maintaining and expanding public education...
...Surely no colorful embezzler in all history—not even Ivan Krueger—distorted the facts more flagrantly than has Mr...
...Roosevelt has spent more for destruction than was spent by all the combined warrior leaders in any previous thousand years of human history...
...What the Professor does not tell us is that these two Democratic Presidents have been mainly responsible for what the United States has spent for destruction and that Mr...
...The Germans might be "educated" into a nation of pacifists, but a clique of clever "villains" could very probably provoke a situation which would lead the populace to believe that war was inevitable and to support it a matter of sheer survival...
...Michie's notion of utilizing air power—an air police force—to preserve peace is probably sound, even though it is not exactly a novel discovery with him...
...Michie argues that, because the German people followed the Kaiser and Hitler to war, the Germans must all be warlike barbarians by their very biological nature...
...The main reflection which occurs to the reviewer about such books is something like the following: if a bank clerk falsifies his books and the depositors lose a few thousand dollars, the culprit is sent to the hoose-gow for a long term...
...Nor does he mention the fact that the League itself long kept out of membership two countries whose adhesion would have been more important than that of the United States, namely, Germany and Russia...
...Michie and his book the publishers tell us in their blurb that "Better, perhaps, than any other correspondent, Allan Michie knows the commanding generals of the Allied air forces...
...Indeed warlike against Ethiopia and very apathetic in following Mussolini against the French, British, and Americans...
...Reviewed by Harry Elmer Barnes PROF...
...This failure is blamed mainly on Henry Cabot Lodge and other opponents of Mr...
...FLEMING'S book is both a brochure on peace and a Democratic campaign tract...
...Nor does he make it plain that these failures would have taken place even if the United States had joined...
...WITH respect to Mr...
...Roosevelt has spent for destruction in three years utterly dwarfs all that the Romans spent for war between the mythical founding of the Eternal City in 753 B. C. and the fall of Constantinople in 1453 A. D. It might fairly be observed, however, that Mr...
...Michie has relatively little to say about air power in the book and what he says could have been supplied by any alert high school student who had read the newspapers, without ever seeing a plane in the air...
...It eulogizes the achievements of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt in respect to foreign policy, though not neglecting the contributions of the New Freedom and the New Deal to domestic well-being...
Vol. 8 • September 1944 • No. 38
