THE SHADOWS BEFORE
Meyer, Ernest L.
The Shadows Before By ERNEST L. MEYER IN THESE PIECES in the past I have had occasion to quote once or twice from the book, Days of Our Years, by the distinguished Holland-born foreign...
...A Bit Of Light Van Paassen wrote that in the long years preceding World War II he saw the gradual return of every state to that old theory so often discredited in the past: if you want peace prepare for war...
...The Shadows Before By ERNEST L. MEYER IN THESE PIECES in the past I have had occasion to quote once or twice from the book, Days of Our Years, by the distinguished Holland-born foreign correspondent Pierre Van Paassen...
...But can that be done...
...For they mean profits through the stimulation of the inner market, a safeguard against violation of a foreign market by rivals, and preparation for a redivi-sion of the world's markets...
...Humanity will never get rid of the one until it gets rid of the other...
...I have quoted at length from Van Paassen not to prove him right as a prophet in foretelling the present catastrophe—that is blood washed under the bridge...
...But I have yet to meet the man or the woman who longs for war, or who thinks that war would benefit anyone...
...Everything...
...In every country you find organizations to foster peace and international understanding...
...But giant international cartels, of which the armament industries are only a part, surely are the flints that set off the powder of battle...
...But if we expose and fight them at every turn, if we insist that the voice of the little people be heard in the councils, we may yet inherit the age of reason once dreamed by Paine and despoiled by the Pharisees...
...The League of Nations, the Kellogg Pact to outlaw war, the Disarmament Conference, Briand's eloquence, Cecil's zeal, Stresemann's pleading, Litvinov's arguments-all the ceaseless striving of the innumerable peace societies, all of it has been sterile, all of it has come to nought...
...For 13 years I have wandered up and down the European continent inquiring and observing, talking with leaders in the social, religious, economic, and political spheres in every country...
...And yet war is coming again...
...Today, and still in the name of expedient diplomacy, we are playing ball with Fascist Franco, with the collaborationist and cartel-controlled Pierlot in Belgium...
...In his book, Van Paassen carefully traces the political alignments that preceded World War II, how the Tories of England and France played ball with the Nazis of Germany to stave off a visioned upsurge of the Reds, and all in the name of expedient diplomacy...
...Why is it that, far from having been abolished, a new and more frightful kind of warfare than any | that has ever been waged in the past seems to be facing humanity," Van Paassen asked six years ago...
...This war has followed so closely on the heels of the last that we can learn valuable lessons without digging into dusty archives...
...Imagine what staggering proportions unemployment would reach in Germany, Italy, England, France, and Japan, if all the men now engaged in munition factories, armament plants, steel mills, clothing factories, chemical laboratories, shipyards, mines, forests, and all the other auxiliaries of the war industry, not to speak of the legions in the armies, navies, and air forces of the^orld, should suddenly be thrown out of work...
...There are things more precious to preserve than civilization and democracy...
...At the Chicago aviation conference, at this writing, the British and American interests are still at loggerheads over some formula for division of the loot, with smaller nations barking in the sidelines for their share of the profits...
...But to suggest that his analysis still holds in weighing the forces that today,, with World War II still blasting the earth, are heading us toward a possible and still ghastlier World War III...
...Nobody has found a solution, not even the Neo-Marxists of Russia who were going to found a new world...
...And yet it is almost here...
...They cherish their armament campaigns as the highest good...
...The President himself, in an oblique and weasel fashion, has blessed the plan...
...In one field alone, civil—not military—aviation, the Allies, with the war not yet won, are already locking horns for peacetime control of the skies...
...Who wants war anyway...
...Yet at best they only hoped that it would be prevented...
...War is inseparable from the capitalist system of production...
...There is a dreadful repetitiousness in the pattern...
...Where should America's precarious prosperity be on the day when that should come to pass...
...But war is not an act of God like an earthquake or a flood...
...In all this darkness there is the light at least of a candle...
...The modern states will never voluntarily disarm...
...The Great Exception "To solve this puzzle became an anguishing preoccupation with me in the years when I saw the gradual return of every state to that old theory so often discredited in the past: if you want peace prepare for war...
...The Profits Of Death "No, rather than face an interruption of the profit system, the imperialist states prefer a universal armament race, even at the risk of plunging the nations into a second World War...
...And even as I write these words, the news comes that England has knifed Count Sforza, consistent and militant democrat and choice of six anti-Fascist parties, as the new leader of Italy...
...What is the matter...
...What is pushing us toward it...
...They, too, fell back upon the old methods, and imitated the bourgeois governments in creating a formidable war machine of their own...
...Really everything...
...Why are millions of men under, arms again ready for the slaughter...
...Any tolerably well-informed observer knows that Manchukuo, Ethiopia, the Rhiifeland's remilitarization, and Spain are but preludes to a finale of abysmal woe which is in store for the peoples...
...The war came, the theory has again been discredited, but with World War II still going strong there are powerful voices raised to enforce in America a program of permanent peacetime conscription...
...Everything has been tried to set the world in the ways of peace,' remarked Lord Cecil to me one day...
...Yes, everything except the one thing that will make war truly impossible : disarmament...
...Wouldn't that be a disaster of the first magnitude...
...It is more important to assure the continuous flow of dividends into the coffers of a small international coterie which owns the banks and the land and the means of production, than to employ the earth's resources in the satisfaction of the physical, social, and spiritual needs of all men, all peoples, and all races of the earth...
...With so much good will in the world, with so general an awareness of the danger, and so universal an opposition to war, why is it that the highways of Europe resound again with the metallic step of the heavy-shod legions...
...Thus expedient diplomats are playing the old, old game in the shadow of power politics cast over the bleeding landscape by Dumbarton Oaks...
...It is not an inescapable fatality...
...The armament industry, per se, is not the sole impetus toward war...
...If we follow blindly the behests of the current militarists, the monopoly-minded capitalists, the "realistic" diplomats, we will slide inevitably into World War III...
...Written in 1938, a year before the outbreak of the present war, the author predicted the world conflict and analyzed what he considered the impulses leading mankind to slaughter...
...Van Paassen, in his journey to discover the answer to the question "what is ptfshing us toward war," must continue his weary pilgrimage...
Vol. 8 • December 1944 • No. 50
