HOW TO LOSE THE PEACE

...Five billion dollars would be a conservative estimate, and I will leave it to experts in public health and education to say how vastly more good this sum would do if it could be spent for hospitals and clinics and schools and adult education...

...He goes even beyond the War Department in seeking to put every young man, regardless of his physical fitness, at the disposition of the State for some form of training which would make him useful in war...

...Our soldiers and sailors are now charging in letters home that delays in mobilization are largely due to the reluctance of high officers to go down to lower rank or to become altogether "surplus...

...In his speech, not content with his conscript reserves, he advocates a greatly enlarged National Guard and a professional army far bigger than in our previous history...

...It is the evidence that Mr...

...The rapidity of mobilization made possible by conscription prevented second thought...

...The world drifts with dangerous speed to ultimate war between two great imperial blocs, one centering about the Soviet Union and one about the United States...

...Instead, in complete bewilderment he falls back on the old policies of power in which there is no peace...

...It is particularly true now, whether or not President Truman admits it even to himself, that he is arming against Russia and is making military power a substitute for the program necessary to lasting peace...

...If I were William Green or Philip Murray, or John L. Lewis, I should hurry to the White House to inquire how Mr...

...To be sure, the President says that "universal military training is not conscription...

...Moreover, does he seriously believe that the high-powered military and imperialist propaganda of the Army and Navy Departments and the Chamber of Commerce will long be content with only one year's training for men who cannot be used in armies of occupation or other imperial adventures...

...It should be the business of an international authority not subject to the veto of any power to supervise and enforce these renunciations...

...If for conscientious reasons he should refuse, he will face jail or at best some form of alternative service at the behest of the military state...

...Truman is even more bewildered when he considers the political aspects of war and peace than when he deals with the new technology...

...Look at the history of Europe or at the real conditions in our own military camps if you think they are the best schools of health, morality, and democracy for our youth...

...So terrible is the possible destruction of this new warfare that fear of it may be a greater restraint than in the past to war, but, alas, it is already obvious that such fear will not prevent war...

...Truman means to train men so that in emergency they can "take their places in shipyards, munitions factories, and similar industrial plants" without interfering with free labor and providing for a later development of statism into totalitarianism along the lines followed by Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin, all of whom were dealing with workers accustomed for generations to obey the voice of the drill sergeant...

...THE President's own lack of understanding or his willingness to fool his people is further shown by his rhetorical questions near the end of his speech, all of them meant to imply that atomic bombs will be useless without old-fashioned mass armies and big navies because in this war the Army and Navy had to be used to ''fight our way to points within striking distance of the heart of the enemy...

...But all this will not be conniption because trainees "will not be enrolled in any of the armed services...

...a secure peace...

...As a matter of fact no single thing will do more to make a possible aggressor than to continue the race in competitive armaments which peacetime military conscription inevitably implies...

...Has the President never heard of labor conscription in Europe, whose slaves are certainly not enrolled in armed forces...

...It must instead be built on general renunciation of such power...

...Under these conditions, what earthly good would be our conscript reserve...

...The President's speech is one more proof that Hitlerism is winning the war which Hitler lost...

...When he has finished, under the President's plan, he will be a member of a "Special Reserve" for six years, and then for the rest of his able-bodied life a member of the "General It Reserve" of the "Post War Military Organization...

...This at the very moment when...

...This is to Russia's true interest, as it is to the interest of every other people on earth, even granting that Russia soon will have the secret of the atomic bomb...

...2) The new war will of necessity begin with a surprise attack because the nation making the first attack is the only one with a chance of survival...

...It is more even than the universal abolition of peacetime military conscription which should be a goal second only to the renunciation of the use of atomic energy in war...

...Subconsciously, at least, President Truman expects it, or he would not proclaim the ancient and fallacious platitude that "peace must be built on power," meaning national military power...

...essential for a training program in another war...

...from Army and Navy officers who want the jobs, the rank, and the prestige that only big peacetime armies can give- them...

...It's human nature not to want to get rid of something which gives you a job...

...This is to ignore the real significance of the new age of atomic energy...

...What we ought to be doing is moving heaven and earth to persuade Stalin to join us in renewing the proposal he himself made less than 20 years ago, namely, that the nations renounce military conscription and undertake progressive disarmament...

...Is it Canada or Mexico which might overrun us or that we must overrun...

...It is not merely true in general terms that competitive militarism and peacetime military conscription foster war and the emotional attitudes which sustain it...

...It was in order that we might initiate one of the major steps by which they became what they were: the practice of peacetime military conscription...

...The first attack upon the United States, the scientists agree, would be made at long range and could destroy Washington and every principal industrial and educational center, and most of the people in them..Probably, they tell us, a fourth of our population would be destroyed in that first attack...

...In a long speech the President gives two short paragraphs to a perfunctory argument that his demand for such force as we never dreamt of when we were wicked isolationists "denotes no lack -of faith in the United Nations Organization" but rather an intention "to support the organization" against "possible future aggressors...

...Despite the reluctance of the American people to support the burdens of militarism and imperialism, they have not yet realized or accepted the positive anti-militarist and anti-imperialist program which is the price of peace...

...that it has never prevented any war, and that it contributed directly to the coming of World War I, which might have been prevented by second thought...

...It is to think in terms of the last war...

...Every boy must give one full year of his life to train for war under army officers or go to jail...

...Not only Army and Navy of-ficers, but civilians, seem to expect another war with greater or less resignation...

...MR...

...Sooner or later each and every one of them has made it plain to me that he wants conscription to "indoctrinate" our boys, "discipline" America, "impress foreign nations" with our strength and determination, and to maintain what the President calls "the necessary organization, the required camp installations" etc...

...Surgeons might hate to see the vermiform appendix abolished, or preachers to see the sudden elimination of sin...

...all the scientists in hearings before Congressional committee and in public statements are hammering home two facts: (1) In any future war atomic bombs will be propelled and guided by rockets and radar devices incredibly more proficient than the appalling beginning of rocket warfare which the Germans, without atomic energy, have already made in the recent war...

...Neither is planning for peace...

...But neither the President nor any other high ruler seems capable of arousing the people to what is essential for their safety, or of preparing a program fit for lasting peace...

...But beyond all this lies the task of making settlements in Europe and Asia fit for lasting peace, and mobilizing the conscience of the world for the healing of hunger and hate...

...Or does the President also contemplate an indefinite maintenance of Selective Service to fill the armies of occupation...

...Truman and his advisers give by the timing of the speech, by its tone, and by its setting in the politics of rival imperialisms, that they have all but abandoned hope of man's capacity to master atomic energy for life rather than the incredible destruction with which it now threatens us...

...It is an amazing paradox that some of the self-proclaimed liberals, whose only program is appeasement of Stalin no matter what Stalin does, either support or do not oppose peacetime military conscription which is directed in the minds of the inner circle of the Army and Navy almost entirely against Stalin or his successor...

...The price of peace—yes, and of the continued existence of democracy—is something more than the defeat of the President's proposals for training our conscript youth in the ways of war...

...The plain truth is that the propaganda for conscription comes mostly from people with their own ax to grind: from a State Department that would substitute force for the intelligent program it notably has lacked...

...The large armies they would provide are only of conceivable use for imperialist occupation of weak nations, or of resistance to such occupation from an immediate neighbor...

...He has said that he wants the renunciation of atomic energy for war, but no such renunciation will be binding except as an important part of getting rid of war itself...

...Truman, as Hanson Baldwin says of our admirals and generals, considers the atomic bomb as "just anofher weapon" instead of the transformer of war...

...It is of secondary importance to predict which of them will be the more guilty for the catastrophe that looms ahead...

...Nothing gives more support to the cynical saying that "the only lesson history teaches is that men learn nothing from history," than the President's avowed belief that peacetime militarv conscription is consistent with...

...Who those aggressors may be in a world in which the wicked have been disarmed and the peace loving nations are triumphant, the President does not say...

...THIS is semantic nonsense, a stupid if not dishonest playing with words...

...It is as absurd to believe that the United Nations needs the support of its competitively armed members, or that it can endure the strains of an armament race, as it is to believe that the United States could exist if every one of the 48 states was arming against the others with the understanding that a*council at Washington could call out a sherriff's posse against an aggressor, provided that neither New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, or California should obiect...

...But he has had time to reconsider our policy in the light of the coming of the atomic bomb...

...If peacetime conscription would be useful in such a war—which I greatly doubt—it would enormously favor Russia because of her strategic position and her greater population and birth rate...

...There is just one power in the world which could possibly threaten us with war and that is the Soviet Union...

...IN discussions with high military officials and spokesmen for the Army, I have never yet found one man who seriously believed that peacetime conscription would avert war, or that to begin it now was a military necessity—not even before the coming of the atomic bomb...

...And the defeat of the President's proposal will be of enormous significance hot only in itself but as..a symbol of the awakening of the American people to the new emotional attitude as well as the political and economic programs and institutions on which their hope of life depends...

...In an age of atomic energy no nation which thinks it worthwhile to fight at all will dare not to use the most effective instrument at its disposal, that is, atomic explosives...

...The President mentioned no estimated cost for this program of total peacetime conscription of all our young men but it would run to staggering figures...

...This is a truth evident ever since the invention of gunpowder...

...He was, to be sure, the heir to a difficult eituation and Roosevelt's wholly negative program of Unconditional Surrender...

...from a Chamber of Commerce which looks upon conscription and big armaments as patriotic boondoggling, calculated to give them profit and to alleviate an unemployment they cannot or will not cure...

...The history of Kurope shows that such conscription invites competition among neighboring nations, gives to immense groups a vested interest in maintaining fear and hate of other nations...

...But as we value life it is our business as human beings to get rid of war...

...THE most ominous thing about the President's speech on universal military training is not the dangerous errors which it contains...