PEACE-IT'S WONDERFUL'
'Peace-It's Wonderful' THE growing demand in America for an affirmative, clear-cut statement of aims and objectives in the war against Japan has now become so insistent as to alarm the Tory...
...Martin's resolution was greeted with derisive comment from the new school of "realists" and from Congressional spokesmen for the military bureaucracy...
...Rep...
...Although its contribution up to now to the defeat of Japan is invisible to the naked eye (for instance, American vessels clearing through the Suez Canal en route to the war zones must still pay heavy tolls), the Churchill regime last week had the gall to scold this country for agitating for a sensible modification of the war-prolonging doctrine of Unconditional Surrender...
...DOPvOTHY THOMPSON, in a syndicated column last week, struck the same note: "Assuming that the Japanese leaders are not insane—which may be a false assumption in a world that appears largely insane—it would seem that a straightforward formulation of exactly what we are fighting for might end the Far Eastern war...
...Joseph W. Martin, Jr„ Massachusetts, Republican leader in the House of Representatives, earned the support of all progressive-minded Americans last week when he introduced a resolution calling on Administration leaders to obtain an agreement from other nations of the world to abandon "peacetime military conscription of youth for military service...
...Peace-It's Wonderful' THE growing demand in America for an affirmative, clear-cut statement of aims and objectives in the war against Japan has now become so insistent as to alarm the Tory Government of Great Britain...
...Walter Lippmann joined the growing chorus last week...
...Agreeing, as we all do, on the vital need of liqui-3ating Japanese militarism, Baldwin, nevertheless, makes it clear that "Unconditional Surrender is not enough...
...We began the war with the Atlantic Charter and will end it with no compass or standards whatever, in a world of chaos...
...So did Hanson Baldwin, military analyst for the New York Times...
...In a highly significant article last week, Baldwin said: "Japan is seeking a way out of the holocaust of flame and death to which her own policies have brought her...
...We made it in behalf of 'peace-loving nations,' and shall finish it with permanent conscription in the United States...
...Well, isn't there room for just a little idealism in a world gone mad with power politics and a chilling "realism...
...Therefore, as the 'bombing and bulldozer' phase of the war in the Pacific continues, the need for a firm and positive restatement of American policy toward Japan is more and more imperative...
...A Statesmanlike Proposal REP...
...We began it to 'end war' and shall finish it with an international armaments race between the victors...
...We must hold out to the Japanese people, just as we must hold out to the German people, the hopes of a better life, free from the tyranny of the militaristic leaders who provoked the war, if we are to avoid a long drawn-out struggle in the Pacific...
...Clifton A. Woodrum, chairman of the House Postwar Military Committee which has lately released a report calling for universal peacetime military service, issued a statement whose sneering climax was that Martin's proposal was "a wonderfully idealistic contemplation...
...Meanwhile, the campaign for American formulation of democratic, affirmative war aims in the Pacific is gaining new and influential recruits...
...Perhaps the simplest reply to this new lecture from London might be that Americans are out of sympathy with the idea of pouring their men, money, and materials into the costly conflict against Japan with only token aid from one of our great Allies and none at all from the other...
...Father Divine certainly described the peace we shall have—'It's Wonderful.' Meaning: conducive to astonishment...
...Martin was clearly on sound ground when he emphasized in his resolution that the U. S. delegate to the United Nations organization should "work unceasingly for an immediate international agreement whereby compulsory military service shall be wholly eliminated from the policies and practices of all nations" and to do so "before the United States adopts any legislation for universal military training...
...Pondering the implications of not only our criminal insistence on the totally negative doctrine of Unconditional Surrender, but our repeated surrender of principle in favor of a new and bitter "realism," Miss Thompson winds up with this cynical but eminently sound conclusion: "We appear deliberately to have chosen not to consider the results of our policies—although there are some guides in logic and history for our leaders' minds...
...Anything less than this would surely be a betrayal of not only basic American tradition, but the very principles for which, we claimed we were fighting...
...Shouldn't it be the role of democratic America, not to disarm unilaterally, but to take the lead, as Martin urges, for worldwide abandonment of peacetime conscription ? Have we grown so tired and cynical, in this crusade for the Four Freedoms, that we will not even make a fight for a basic principle ? Rep...
...In a London dispatch to the Chicago Sun, Frederick Kuh reported that the official British statement, fed to the press by unidentified authorities, emphasized that "British diplomacy is out of sympathy with the campaign of some American newspapers and broadcasters in favor of modulating the Unconditional Surrender terms...
Vol. 9 • July 1945 • No. 31
