IF I WERE A DELEGATE AT SAN FRANCISCO'
Thomas, Norman
If I Were A Delegate At San Francisco' An Urgent Appeal To The United Nations Delegates By NORMAN THOMAS FELLOW delegates: We are assembled here in the service of the greatest cause on earth. The...
...All these things might be done, or at any rate begun, with comparatively few changes in the imperfect machinery proposed at Dumbarton Oaks...
...There should be a relaxing of restrictions on trade, but our economic goal cannot be reached by an automatic working of something called or miscalled "free trade," which slogan itself can be used to mask an exploitation of non-industrialized peoples by the imperial powers...
...On the contrary, if the Pact remains an attempt to freeze permanently the world as it will be moulded by the passions of this war, it will be a beginning on the road to new war rather than to lasting peace...
...This is already apparent from the resentment, as yet only partly articulate, among smaller nations and colonial peoples...
...On no other terms will unity be permanent or productive of peace...
...But more than that it is necessary to provide the full employment within the industrial nations and the steady raising of the standard of living in the poorer nations on which a secure peace will depend...
...I beg of you, representatives of Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the USSR, to believe me when I say that it is for the sake of your own gallant sons as well as of America's that I urge that we set up an organization dedicated to the achievement of a better pattern of human relations than that imperialism which in various forms through so many sorrowful centuries has drenched the earth in blood and tears...
...Second, the basis for lasting peace must be assurance to all colonial peoples with a national consciousness that they are entitled to independence within a framework of regional and world-wide organization...
...If any nation great or small is unwilling to start with us on the road that leads to a true fraternity of peoples it will be far better that we who share common principles should go forward and by the success of our organized cooperation persuade the hesitant to come in...
...We do not ask perfection or expect immediately to arrive at the goal of a worldwide federation of free peoples...
...It is in the last analysis an organization of military might of rival empires exercised not under the control of the peoples of the world, but of the professional general staffs of the permanent members of the Security Council...
...The Council should facilitate the making of multilateral trade agreements...
...It must be made easier of amendment...
...Aggression should be specifically defined and the role of the World Court clarified and strengthened...
...The mere end of the war system will do much to guarantee general access to raw materials...
...First, it is our business to make it plain that we do not propose to set up machinery to guarantee a peace based on imperialism and vengeance...
...Fourth, great ideals of liberty or justice cannot be truly realized in a world where the extremes of wealth and poverty, economic advantage and disadvantage, are as great as in our own...
...What the Dumbarton Oaks Pact gives us in its setting of the Yalta agreement is a Triple Alliance with a facade of internationalism...
...It is our business to see if we can revise and supplement that Pact so as to make a worthy beginning of an organization of free peoples...
...We are preparing not for victory in war, but for the conquest of war before it brings new Dark Ages over all the earth...
...But we shall not save our children or our children's children from the unimaginable devastation of a third world war unless we shall at least make a beginning of organizing a society of nations based on a just peace settlement, a reconciliation of all peoples, and the universal end of imperial exploitation...
...I recognize the difficulty of working out this arrangement in a world obviously unready even for such degree of democratic centralized government as the Swiss have worked out...
...We Do Not Ask Perfection On no other terms can lasting peace be won...
...Ideally it should represent the peoples of the world rather than governments...
...It should be our function or that of the Assembly we set up to draft a universal Bill of Rights which will include recognition of equality between races...
...Admittedly peace requires the disarmament of Germany and Japan, but that disarmament will not be enough nor will it be long enforced in a world of rival imperialisms unless there is general disarmament, control over the making of arms by international authority, and the universal renunciation of military conscription...
...The cause is lasting peace...
...It may lie in some carefully considered scheme of weighted representation of the peoples of the world in the Assembly...
...Rather police power itself is incidental to a common purpose of serving our common interests...
...No metaphysics of sovereignty can make Albania equal to Russia...
...Nothing is farther from the truth...
...Amending The Pact The kind of Economic Council that we set up and its relations to the well-established International Labor Office, to the International Food Office that has been proposed, and to whatever international fiscal agencies may be established, will be of the utmost importance...
...Third, freedom of nations will be of little value unless the men in them are free...
...Perhaps the best plan would be periodic examination with a view to revision of all treaties which offend the sense of justice of any nation and so become a danger to peace...
...Let none of you think because I say these things that I and the millions of Americans who in their hearts agree with me are trying to hide opposition to any international organization by demanding of it an impossible perfection...
...If here we cannot discuss the terms of peace, we can at least insist that they be subject to revision on the initiative of the Assembly we are to constitute...
...I realize that you will be helped to it by an absence of racial prejudice which I covet for my own country...
...Peace is far more than a matter of police force...
...If it is necessary to move slowly in order that we may move together, we are willing to move slowly...
...There is no city or tiny hamlet in any of our countries which is held together solely or chiefly by the power of the police...
...I know the bravery of your people and how much more terrible in this war has been your suffering than ours...
...But neither the world organization nor the constituent nations will direct their attention to these fundamental social problems in any adequate fashion so long as they persist in the expensive rivalries of competitive armaments and countenance that peacetime military conscription which historically has helped pave the way for fascism and war...
...It should plan for controls of relatively scarce minerals necessary for modern armament on terms that will make them available to all for the uses of peace and to none for war...
...The assertion at Dumbarton Oaks of the equality of sovereign nations in the composition of the Assembly has resulted in practice in putting all real power in the Security Council...
...It may lie partly in the formation of a United States of Europe with appropriate representation...
...Nevertheless it is possible that out of our discussion may eventually come some improvement in the present plan that will be far better than the arbitrary allotment of extra votes to any of the great powers...
...Even so, no nation, neither my United States today nor your USSR tomorrow, will ever be mighty enough long to impose its own peace on its own terms over the whole world...
...Beyond this we should at least discuss the basis for the composition of the Assembly...
...But only if we start in the right direction...
...No nation should be allowed to render or to prevent judgment in its own case...
...The Basis Of Cooperation I have dwelt upon these truths which ought to be axiomatic because the propaganda to which I have referred has so misrepresented the case of the critics of the Dumbarton Oaks Pact, and the press and radio have given us relatively so little opportunity to explain our position...
...We who have at such terrible cost crushed the evil aspirations of 2 great nations to play the role of a master race dare not substitute our own faith in white supremacy, or our own dogma of the predestined dominion of any particular nation or party...
...The remedy does not lie in increasing the number of votes for the USSR...
...Freedom For All It will be apparent that I am even more concerned for what our new organization will try to do than with the excellence of its machinery for doing it...
...What is proposed in the Dumbarton Oaks Pact is not even properly speaking a worldwide police force...
...I do not suggest arrangements by which the world may be plunged in war allegedly to enforce these rights, but rather arrangements by which the moral conscience of mankind may be increasingly enlisted in their support...
...A new organization which can neither heal the resentment of the weaker peoples nor end the rivalries of competitively armed empires can never bring to the world the great gift of security, to say nothing of the greater gift of peace...
...It is a position immensely critical of imperialism, especially of the seeming intention of the Big 3 to perpetuate indefinitely white empires in Asia and Africa, and to sacrifice those new methods upon which lasting peace depends to the will of Stalin in the settlement of the affairs of eastern Europe...
...To no imperialism, economic or political, am I more opposed than to any effort of my own Government to supplant your white empires in Asia or to exact from you a great price for restoring and maintaining them with the lives of our sons...
...Furthermore I know that if the nations are to continue to play the game of power politics you Russians are destined in a few decades to such a dominant position as no nation ever achieved...
...Especially will this be the case if regional organizations like the United States of Europe should be encouraged by this Conference and not discouraged as they are today the Big 3. But some changes in the Pact are essential...
...The ultimate guarantor of that right must be the world organization, and its agencies should have the function of guiding dependent peoples to full self-government...
...If our world organization will set its mind to these tasks, there will be less and less danger of aggression...
...Peace includes security, but it is greater and more dynamic than security...
...Too largely the Dumbarton Oaks Pact and the discussion of it have emphasized security rather than peace, a security resting in the last analysis on the might of the stronger governments of the earth...
...Deeply as we desire a world organization which will be inclusive of all peoples, neutrals and those whom we now count enemies as well as our present Allies, we are not willing to pay for it the price of surrender to a perpetuation of an uneasy triple alliance imperialism camouflaged as internationalism...
...We must deal with the world as it is for the sake of the world as it might become...
...Control of whatever international military force is provided must be taken out of the hands of the General Staffs of the Permanent Powers and its usefulness must not be negated by a continuing race in armaments...
...Representation in it should be proportioned according to the population and other elements in the strength of nations...
...Great harm has already been done in my own country and probably abroad by official and well subsidized unofficial propaganda to the effect that the first duty of the lover of peace is blindly to accept the Dumbarton Oaks Pact as a "good beginning," essentially unalterable, to which the only alternative would be a new world war...
...It is not within our power to make all things new...
...The Assembly must be given legislative power within the carefully limited fields which I have outlined...
...I close as I began with a plea that, recognizing the necessity of lasting peace for the sake of everything we cherish, we realistically face the adjustments that are the price of peace...
...Our concern must be with peace resting upon the positive cooperation of free peoples...
...It is equally apparent in the rivalries of the 3 major powers which have been temporarily compromised but by no means ended by the Yalta agreement and its cynical betrayal of the Atlantic Charter...
Vol. 9 • April 1945 • No. 17
