BLESSED ARE THE BLOCKBUSTERS
Meyer, Ernest L.
Blessed Are The Blockbusters By ERNEST L. MEYER THE lieutenant, just back from 3 years' service in the Pacific, was vehement. Moreover, he was deadly serious. Someone had commented on Tokyo's new...
...France, for 4 years under the Nazi heel and then baptized by bombs in the Allied reconquest, shells soldiers and citizens of the Levant in her lust for oil and military bases...
...They demand not less war, but more war...
...England, which has suffered nightmare in resisting the mad Fuehrer who dreamed of world domination, does some dominating herself with machine guns in Greece, and only a few days ago Lord Beaverbrook, spokesman for the Tories, cried that it is time for the British to start a new crusade for empire...
...No national navies, standing armies, tank and bomber and poison gas factories...
...The Americans, true, have no ambitions for conquest...
...Bat ail this, the lieutenant countered grimly, was not total war...
...A woman's murmur of outrage was checked by the pieutenant who said it was too bad that the balloon bombs hadn't blasted San Francisco or Seattle...
...Study a few recent events...
...There was the item of more than a million military casualties to date, with long lists from the Pacific still due for many months to come...
...Such a disaster would not have added to the feeling of universal brotherhood...
...And in sharing the suffering caused by war and enmity, he said, they would battle more valiantly for enduring peace, for the end of imperialistic ambitions, and for a cooperative commonwealth of nations...
...Have they learned the futility and madness of militarism and war ? One doesn't know...
...It is not yet too late for even the "good nations" to make a choice between blockbusters and brotherhood...
...Where is the humility that is the product of terror endured, and where the brotherhood...
...It would be right in their front yard, and they would share the suffering of nations whose cities and citizens had been pounded to rubble and bones and dust...
...You can't conceal a huge military machine any more than you can conceal a cancer on the nose...
...Someone had commented on Tokyo's new tactic of sending to the United States bomb-laden balloons, one of which recently killed half a doz-en picknickers in the West...
...One puff, one push, one pretext artfully contrived as was the habit of the unlamented Hitler, and the world rolls again into the black pit...
...Nations have a habit of forgetting the frightful-ness of past carnage just as a sot forgets last week's hangover...
...It is cause for rejoicing rather than regret that New York and Washington and San Francisco have not been laid waste by TNT...
...There is no such thing as "secret rearming...
...Total war meant men and women and children scurrying nightly into air-raid shelters, total war meant homes in flames and charred bodies in bomb craters, and starvation arid disease, and a carnival of rape and ruin...
...There was— etc...
...Endurance of pain is no guarantee of piety...
...Last Week's Hangover Now this is a neat notion, but it won't bear scrutiny...
...And until a people wade through a river of blood, he said, they will never reach the harbor of brotherhood...
...It Is Not Too Late As it is, our country can and should take the lead in demanding of the new international order a program of progressive and eventually complete disarmament...
...The Yugoslavs, who have undergone terrific punishment, mete out some of the same to the dwellers of Trieste...
...The "secret rearming" of Hitler and Hirohito was an open book more than a decade ago to the "good nations" who actually helped in providing materials for the machines of militarism...
...For then, he said, smacking his knee for emphasis, Americans would know what war was really about...
...No phony 5-5-3 ratio such as scuttled the aims of past conferences and merely temporized with the juggernaut...
...Blessed are the blockbusters if they are messengers of a holy cause—your own...
...We'd heard it before, but never so passionately put...
...He added that it was also too bad that German V-bombs hadn't laid flat square miles of New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington with heavy casualties among the population...
...That is the dominant and dangerous philosophy of the hour...
...Someone commented timidly that America has not escaped entirely unscathed...
...Yet that does not apply to the millions of young men who have fought and are fighting our battle on many scattered fronts, who have faced terror more continual and acute than the burrowed civilian populations of London and Stalingrad...
...There was the item of a 250-billion-dollar public debt, saddling us and generations of tomorrow...
...There is nothing in history to show that memory of war's horror has proved a check to the recurrence of war...
...It would have added millions of civilian voices to the clamor now raised for the permanent militarization of America...
...The program is neither Utopian nor unenforceable...
...It would have added only to the already monumental burden of hate and lust for revenge that menaces any future formula for peace...
...But a ratio of 0-0-0-0-0...
...It is also true, as the lieutenant stressed, that our country as a whole has been spared the savagery of total war...
...That was the lieutenant's thesis...
...What they ask is an American policy of permanent peacetime conscription, and if there is one thing that history points out in bold letters it is that nations with vast standing armies and ambitious military personnel stand forever poised on the very brink of war...
...But their accredited spokesmen here at home, speaking for the huge veterans' organizations, speaking for the soldiers and sailors and marines dying in the mud and jungles of Okinawa, demand not less militarism but more...
Vol. 9 • June 1945 • No. 26
