WORLD DISARMAMENT NOW!
Villard, Oswald Garrison
World Disarmament Now! By OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD SOON after Franklin Roosevelt took office as President he declared that we had "nothing to fear but fear." That was when the country was facing...
...Truman will largely sympathize if only because of the dread of adding more millions to the army of unemployed...
...It does not occur to anyone in authority that this is hardly the hour for calm and rational thinking when our nerves are still jangling, when our emotions are deeply stirred, when we can think only of our wrongs, when the grief of unbearable losses presses down upon so many of us, when we dwell upon the wickedness of those who but yesterday were destroying our precious young manhood...
...We want to act at once, to assure ourselves this very minute that it cannot happen again, that our children's children shall not have their Gethsemane a few years hence, with up-to-date atomic bombs wiping out whole cities at one blast...
...There can be no greater service rendered to the American people, if only to stop the tremendous outlays for completely unproductive military expenditures...
...But Mr...
...For the first time in our history we gave an absolutely free hand and an unlimited exchequer to the Army and the Navy and they went the very limit in demanding everything that they had ever thought of in their wildest dreams of military power...
...Instead, we read Stalin's announcement that he is founding no less than 12 new naval academies and building a vast fleet like our own—to hold the Germans down and control the Baltic and the Dardanelles—and we shiver...
...Truman, Mr...
...We train ouvsoldiers to think war, plan war, and practice war and blame them if they do not do so...
...Those who believe that safety lies only in the drilling of every young American are still demanding universal military service...
...It may trouble our consciences at night...
...That was when the country was facing economic collapse...
...On the contrary...
...The Navy will not think of abandoning its plans for a 500,000-man fleet, and Secretary of War Stimson talks of keeping at least 3,000,000 men indefinitely in the Army to hold down the Germans and Japanese, to garrison the innumerable islands and bases the world over upon which we are to display our flag...
...How can they fail to discover enemies when they know that their profession will cease in a warless world...
...Bernard Iddings Bell of Providence, R. I., lately president of St...
...Even the revelation of the atomic bomb and its monstrous use in slaughtering men, women, and children by the hundred thousand has not set us to yip-yipping in good old American style that we are top dogs for all time...
...Yet their existence, their talking war and planning for war, and their influencing the press with their incessant demands for militarization—all these lead directly to hostilities, even though the generals tell you that no one hates war as much as soldiers...
...Already voices are beginning to be raised along this line...
...That is the way certainly to prevent any possibility of a third global struggle for power...
...It confounds the clergy...
...Won't it be vastly cheaper than six months' expenditure in the next war...
...Attlee and Mr...
...It is the time to insist upon finding other roads to safety —and there are plenty—and above all, to move immediately for complete disarmament by all- nations...
...Still fear of their revival controls us...
...There can be no quicker way to end the reign of fear than to let our every governmental act be ruled by the belief that we have seen the last war and that we propose by cooperation, by the expenditure of some of the vast sums saved by demobilization, to make usable those other roads to international sanity and peace to which I have already referred...
...FROM 1861 to 1865 we fought the greatest war in history prior to World War I. We had more than a million men in arms and they went back into civil life a few months after Appomattox without the slightest friction or delay...
...Of course the Army doesn't want to do that...
...Let us put our faith in this weapon and keep millions of men in the Army and Navy for all time...
...I know that they mean to be patriots and sincerely believe in their doctrines, but they cannot escape the fact that their judgments must inevitably be beclouded because their personal interest and advancement are involved...
...In other words, we are definitely committed to the militaristic theory that we cannot be safe even after our stupendous achievements and the demonstrated fact that no country on earth can compete with us as a fighting nation, excepting Russia, if we do not have armed men with tanks/airplanes, V-l and V-2 bombs, atomic missiles all over the seven seas ready for some marauder to drop down from the skies...
...No voices are raised to urge deferment of definite decisions as to postwar policies, to make sure that we are really taking the right road and advocating the proper methods to bring about that permanent peace which every humane person must desire from the bottom of his heart...
...The brutally vindictive and self-injuring terms which we and the Russians and British have forced on the Germans without any popular mandate, or the vote of a national assembly, reveal only too clearly that no matter what our generals say or how great the destruction of Germany, we are primarily actuated in everything that we are doing in Europe by fear of a beaten Germany, and secondarily by a passionate thirst for vengeance...
...Stephen's College, in a sermon at Trinity Church at the very head of Wall Street, took the opportunity to say the following wise words: "Mr...
...Upon that the parents of America have a right to insist...
...After nearly 50 years of writing on Army and Navy matters and on international relations, I am convinced that there can be no worse advisors in all such matters than the generals and admirals...
...We are to have no faith that the new United Nations organization will soon police the world and safeguard air and sea and land...
...NOW I submit that none of this is worthy of the grandeur of the opportunity for world leadership which has come to us, nor of the tremendous military achievements we have behind us...
...Today, in the face of unparalleled victory in the greatest and worst of all wars, there is 'nothing so plain and so astounding as the fact that almost our every national act is dominated by fear—fear primarily of our beaten and utterly smashed enemy...
...Twelve of our returning generals have just declared jointly that Germany cannot recover and be dangerous militarily for 100 years, and Japan's complete and abject surrender is before us with the loss of all her empire...
...We are convinced that our only hope of freedom in the future is to share the secret of the atomic bomb with no one but Great Britain...
...Its officers, who have risen from low rank to positions of high command, have no desire to return to the slow peacetime methods of promotion and their regular grades...
...FEAR still prevails...
...From the very beginning of the war we have overmanned it...
...If we are going to lead the world into the paths of peace, the first thing to do is to recognize that today we have nothing to fear but fear, that our sole purpose should be, with the aid of the atomic bomb if you please, to make certain that the world has seen the last war...
...That extraordinary American genius that put 3,000,000 men into Normandy and, with the aid of the British, overran all France in a few weeks and triumphantly forged ahead to the Rhine, and which performed such miracles in the Pacific, can certainly engineer the reduction and the repatriation of our forces in record-breaking time...
...For example, the Rev...
...Nobody is to he trusted, and no one is to remember that we shall soon have among us 7,000,000 veterans of the most successful armies in the world's history...
...Stalin should show one another and the rest of the world that they mean business by beginning immediately the demobilization of their armed forces, the scrapping of their armaments and by ceasing to train more peacetime eon-scripts...
...On the contrary, the President on his return from Berlin announced early in his speech that we shall hold all the bases we have captured which we think necessary for our safety and acquire at once such others as we may think we need to protect us...
...There will be the same old tendency to overdo the garrisoning of Japan and Germany although they will be completely disarmed and cannot possibly threaten the order of any district, certainly not beyond the control of a few police...
...This is the last hour, when the blood of our precious youth has only just ceased to flow, to be planning for the next struggle, or even to shape our national policies on the theory that war is inescapable and that, with all its horrors, an atomic war in which five bombsj may destroy the whole city of New York is certain to come...
...But as a Secretary of the Treasury once said as to the resumption of specie payments: "The way to resume is to resume," so the way to disarm is to disarm...
...Whether there was or was not justification for a lavish use of manpower in outlying posts and stations, there can be no excuse whatsoever for failure to demobilize the Army and Navy now with all possible speed to a sensible level...
...Stimson, who seems to have lost his play for universal military service, will fight to the limit to keep his 3,000,000 men, and Mr...
...THE minute we move to reduce our military and naval establishments and call upon the rest of the world to go along with us, the greater will be our moral prestige, and the less we shall hear about the inevitability of the next war...
...WTe may not be very happy about it and its indescribable wholesale destruction of life...
...What if we should vote a billion dollars a year for this purpose instead of voting five billions of dollars annually for the support of the Army and Navy planned by the War and Navy Departments for the forces they propose to maintain ? Undoubtedly the first reply that we shall hear will be that we cannot do that, that the Army and Navy leaders are opposed to it, that we invited the last war because we disarmed, and therefore we must rely upon the professional judgments of our generals and admirals for they know best...
...That it will be extremely difficult to compel our Government to rapid demobilization is obvious enough...
...But still, we say, "How much better that we should be blotting out the vile Japanese than that they should destroy people as good and kind and brave and humane as we...
...It is the road that leads to true safety and genuine peace...
Vol. 9 • August 1945 • No. 35
