THIS IS WAR
Holmes, John Haynes
This Is War By JOHN HAYNES HOLMES This Is War WELL, the war is over, and what have we accomplished ? We have spread such destruction, death, and doom over the surface of the earth as man has...
...And it does still another thing...
...First, /ear/ From the time a war begins, even though the tide of battle is far away, men By JOHN HAYNES HOLMES are afraid...
...It is said that, when President Truman assembled in conference the men who had made the atomic bomb, and asked what should be done with it...
...It renders man incompetent to solve any problems, either new or old...
...The hour of destiny has struck...
...That's our problem—and it's a problem that war has laid unon our threshold...
...And the irony of it is that war is itself the most disastrous and direful of all disputes...
...To get rid of arms and the fear of arms was a major object of the fighting...
...And lastly, vengeance, which is hate at work...
...It's the same old world, with the dead and wounded, the homeless and helpless, added to the sum total of human misery...
...Eventually the split atom should release energy from . 200 million to 500 million times as powerful as anything hitherto known...
...In a sermon preached some time ago in Great St...
...One would suppose that he would learn the one basic lesson taught by every conflict of arms—that war achieves nothing but the progressive exhaustion of human vitality...
...To make the enemy pay for what he has done, to exact from him the uttermost farthing of pain, humiliation and death, this becomes the supreme passion of the hour as the war sweeps on...
...It opens the veins and arteries of humanity, and lets them bleed, until at last death intervenes...
...So far from settling these problems, it only aggravates and thus intensifies them...
...The man who thus spoke saw the truth—that while the bomb brought us momentary victory, it at the same time defeated the very purpose for whieh we had fought—namely, to free men in thsir daily lives from insecurity and fear...
...The United Nations plunged into the war against Hitler in order to protect the integrity of this country...
...Secondly, hate...
...Our own civilization is already far gone...
...Fear, hatred, vengeance—these are the foul brood of war within the*heart of man...
...That's the reason why civilizations rise only to fall...
...We have all but annihilated civilization, and are on the very verge of wiping out the human race...
...A third problem involved in the late war was armaments...
...An English physicist has estimated that in not less than five years, it will be known to everybody...
...It raises up problems, old and new, which must be solved, if civilization is to endure and man himself survive...
...What we front therefore is a world prbblem—the final question of the survival of the rac3...
...This is the most difficult problem that man has ever faced...
...We took up arms to destroy a tyranny, absolute at home and dangerously aggressive abroad, which was threatening to engulf the world...
...War is the supreme evil...
...Conscription, unknown in democratic countries hitherto, is now firmly settled upon us...
...The problem of Poland is worse today than it has e^ar bsen before, yet we fought the most terrible war in history to solve it...
...But now that the fighting is done, we find armaments still with us in a more terrible form than ever...
...It produces out of itself new occasions of difficulty and danger which themselves lead in turn to the next war...
...Thus, in World War II, the immediate problem at the start was Poland...
...Here is a problem as much worse than Hitler, as •Hitler was worse than a babe in arms...
...At last there came a voice—"I wish to God we had never succeeded...
...Vast armaments on land and sea and in the air have become a fixed policy of government...
...There is only one evil for us to destroy these days, and that is the evil of war itself...
...THERE are three things to be said about war—the wars of history and our contemporary wars...
...V SUCH is war...
...It is foolish to deceive ourselves in this matter...
...For nearly 200 years we have been trying this method of war and partition to solve Poland's ills, and always Poland has remained an area of disturbance and a center of infection...
...What we have, as a net result of the war, is a destructive agent already 2000 times as great as any existing explosive...
...It is the supreme problem which absorbs and thus includes all other problems...
...And these are the very things that war banishes from men's lives...
...There was a time, perhaps, when we could temporize with this evil, play with it, even glorify it...
...War consumes men's minds with the devouring fever of a three-fold passion...
...Possessed by psychological devils of this description, man can no longer think, or plan, or work out problems...
...The Day of Judgment has come...
...It is the one evil which" includes all other evils...
...If preparedness leads to war, as I am firmly convinced it does, then the outlook for the future is darker than ever before...
...Another problem involved in the war recently ended is that of totalitarianism...
...This Is War By JOHN HAYNES HOLMES This Is War WELL, the war is over, and what have we accomplished ? We have spread such destruction, death, and doom over the surface of the earth as man has never known before...
...When the smoke of battle is at last lifted, there at the end, in acute form, are the same problems which confronted the combatants at the beginning...
...It would be easy to enumerate the many new problems created by this second World War...
...Only the future can tell whether the blow is mortal...
...For war is a madness that destroys thought, and puts in its place emotionalism of the wildest description...
...One ruler gone mad, one nation,Corrupted or enslaved, and the bomb may be released i to work its havoc upon mankind...
...But with the coming of B-29s, and liquid fire, and finally the atomic bomb, this time has passed forever...
...And it is this war, which does not end but only^reates trouble, to which men resort for the solution of their ills...
...Hence the madness of going to war to end war, or to destroy any evil whatsoever...
...II BT war not only does not settle old problems...
...This totalitarianism took the form of Nazism in Ger- • many, of Fascism in Italy, and of a deified type of militarism in Japan, and in these forms we have destroyed it...
...No nation is proposing, least of all promising, as after the first World War, to disarm...
...Germany, for example—Germany partitioned among her conquerors, deindustrialized, denationalized...
...War has been defined as "man's last means of settling disputes between nations...
...Terror lurks within their hearts...
...Either we must get rid of war, or war will get rid of us...
...War thus perpetuates itself...
...Quite simply," said the Bishop, "I would ask, Are there such evils and what are they...
...But all such problems fade into insignificance as compared with the atomic bomb...
...How can we get rid of war, and thus learn to live together, the world around, in amity and concord...
...And where is the guarantee that It can be.kept to such service...
...By what means can we turn its enormous energy to the creative service'of human need...
...Mary's, Cambridge, England, the Bishop of Birmingham, Dr...
...Men hate the enemy who is responsible for the fear they feel...
...Its solution demands statesmanship of the highest order—rbfains, sound judgment, sobriety, political organization, personal and social discipline...
...Which means that war, like alcohol, creates a vicious circle...
...HI SO war brings new problems, while failing to solve the old...
...it ;reates new ones...
...Under the impact of war, man is no longer a man but a beast, "red in tooth and claw with ravin...
...Who would have dreamed that the end of the war would bring us face to face with a horror of this' magnitude ? We console ourselves with the fact that the bomb is ours, and therefore cannot be used against us...
...This is a force capable, literally, of rending the planet, and blowing it from its orbit in the skies...
...There is only one problem for us to solve these days, and that is the problem of war itself...
...After six years of hideous struggle, has Poland been protected ? On the contrary, her people have been butchered, her soil devastated, her cities ruined, and her territory once again partitioned...
...Out of Pur very triumph, in other words, came a new problem to vex, baffle, and perhaps in the end defeat us...
...Revenge is sweet—and never so sweet as in a war for which we carry, with the enemy, our due share of responsibility...
...How are we going to control this bomb...
...Barnes, attacked the position of those who declare that "there are certain evils which are worse than war...
...What war brings us, at bottom, is the age-old problem of peace...
...But this secret of the split atom cannot be kept...
...First, war never settles the problems which produce it...
...Nobody yet knows whether it has the strength to recover from this latest war...
...It was the refusal of the victor nations to disarm alter Versailles, and the action of Hitler in rearming Germany in a world already armed to the teeth, which was a determining factor in starting hostilities in 1939...
...How can we reconcile ordered society with its potency of destruction...
...A war is a blood-letting...
...The continuous wars thejt fight drain their energies until they die...
...After an experience with war running back over many centuries—back, indeed, to the very dawn of history— it would seem as though man would know something about what this horror does and does not do...
...there fell a great silence over the group...
...t But totalitarianism still remains in Russia and contiguous countries, and by the processes of the war itself has been strengthened and extended beyond anything ever known before...
...And, lest the natural processes of war do not stir up hate black and venomous enough, the government resorts to all kinds of propaganda devices for making sure that the people hate everybody on the other side of the battleline...
...He is quite incompetent to grapple with the enormous difficulties that war forces upon his attention...
Vol. 9 • October 1945 • No. 41
