THERE IS NO PEACE
Rubin, Morris H.
There Is No Peace By MORRIS H. RUBIN (Editor Of The Progressive) THEY1 are calling the approaching Holiday Season the world's first peacetime Christmas in seven years, but there is no peace on...
...Some of the same editorial writers, radio commentators, and politicians who talk so nobly out of one side of their mouths about world government and international cooperation, are just as glib when they use the other side in arguing for conscript armies, buffer states, and spheres of influence for individual nations bent on maintaining their individual security...
...World government may well be the ultimate answer to many of the world's political problems, but the most naive bystander knows that even if the American people could be sold, world government won't be attained in the immediate future...
...People everywhere, and among the intellectuals especially, find it so easy to skip over the nasty-tasting problems of imperialism and power politics and competitive armaments, and, instead, find a welcome jag in the thought that if we could only have world government tonight or tomorrow morning sure, all our problems would be automatically solved...
...Every nation has made its share of mistakes and has been guilty of crimes against the peace...
...rather there has been a unilateral grab of power and spoils by the victorious nations...
...6Guarantee the political boundaries and integrity ? of small nations, but strike at their basic, economic problem by encouraging federation and the development of free trade areas, as, for instance, through a United States of Europe...
...4Reverse bur present policy of revenge and dismem...
...In Europe, Asia, and Africa, British imperialism and Soviet imperialism are jockeying for position in the old game of power politics while America drifts somewhere in the middle...
...The course, it seems to me, is clearly indicated: 1Summoning of a peace conference of an nations at ? the earliest possible moment to draw up a basic settlement of outstanding issues—the settlement then to be turned over to the United Nations Organization for enforcement...
...THE grim situation in the Orient is best illustrated by the bloody warfare in the Netherland East Indies, where impotent Dutch coupon-clippers have refused the Indonesian demand for self-government, and shaking their fists from their safe perch in Holland, have succeeded in mobilizing British imperial troops and American money and materials for a brutal subjection of the independence forces...
...Everywhere, whether it be where they are fighting or only brooding, there is a bitter sadness among the people as they watch the Four Horsemen of War—Imperialism, Competitive Armaments, Power Politics, and Revenge—crush all their hopes that the end of the bloodiest war in all history would usher in an era of peace and international cooperation...
...The panacea is a world assembly elected by the nations that would be either a world parliament or a world government...
...This parliament or government, for the sake of which nations are to renounce their sovereignty to a certain extent, will guarantee complete confidence between the nations and will magically create laws that will exclude the Possibility of wars...
...America has a magnificent opportunity to lead the way—not by force of arms or unilateral compulsions, but by putting our own house in order and breathing new life into democracy—economic and political—and by using our "reservoir of good will" to tip the scales against imperialism wherever our voice is listened to or our aid is needed...
...2An organized effort to secure international agree...
...We'll reduce our military establishments —if you'll do precisely the same thing" ? 3Work for the abandonment of imperialism and ? colonialism and give subject peoples every opportunity to govern themselves—as we have sought to do in the Philippines...
...turning sour even more rapidly than The Progressive warned it would...
...8Draft an International* Bill of Rights setting world ? standards for freedom of religion, the press, speech, and political action...
...7Establish new machinery for the immediate relief ? of the destitute of all countries and encourage the peoples of the world to help themselves by providing long-time credits for long-range economic rehabilitation for nations prepared to underwrite a just and democratic peace...
...ment to prohibit peacetime conscription, provide for orderly, uniform disarmament by all nations, and international control of the atomic bomb...
...There Is No Peace By MORRIS H. RUBIN (Editor Of The Progressive) THEY1 are calling the approaching Holiday Season the world's first peacetime Christmas in seven years, but there is no peace on earth, no good-will among men or nations...
...Nor is this all...
...The political and economic instruments of cooperation were forged months ago at San Francisco and Bret-ton Woods...
...It isn't an impossible ideal...
...Well, it is—a lot tougher than drawing diagrams of the perfect world organization...
...Instead of a meeting of the United Nations Organization on the functioning of the economic agencies agreed upon at Bretton Woods, there has been a revival of naked imperialism, the launching of a new armament race, and a unilateral lunge for power and spoils...
...Despair is turning to desperation as hunger, cold, disease, and hopelessness grip the non-Nazis as well as the Nazis and paralyze incipient liberal and democratic movements while strengthening the position of the Fascists who feed and flourish on discontent and despair...
...It seems to me a readily apparent fact that no matter how many international organizations we have, or how perfectly they may be drawn, they are not worth the paper they are written on unless the world at the same time gets at the basic causes of war—which are imperialism, power politics, spheres of influence, competitive armaments, policies of vengeance, social and economic dislocations, and racial and religious intolerance...
...In Europe, spawning ground of world conflict for three centuries, our policy of revenge is...
...9Democratize the machinery of the United Nations ? Organization by giving smaller nations a greater voice in its deliberations and by providing for amendment of the Charter by democratic means...
...Weak as they may be on paper—and that they are—they have yet to be used and tested...
...JUST as disheartening as the facts of the world situation is the attitude of too many Americans...
...Douglas Mac-Arthur is pursuing in Japan—a policy of encouraging democratic groups to prepare for self-government while uprooting and destroying every possible source of feudal, imperial, militaristic, aggressive action...
...But it must be done—and it can be done—if we have the patience, the vision, the courage, and the energy to fight it out, regardless of the obstacles, the name-calling, and the sneering attacks of the short-cut crowd in the cocktail lounges...
...In the Western Hemisphere, the United States is brandishing the Big Stick while talking piously of the Good Neighbor policy...
...berment in the conquered countries of Europe and launch an enlightened program of encouraging democratic forces while weeding out and turning over to the non-Nazis the job of trying and punishing the Nazi gangsters responsible for the plight of Germany and the world...
...Today the press is full of a new panacea that will secure the world from both the atomic bomb and war," it said sarcastically...
...What shall our program be...
...The achievement of this vital goal is, of course, far more difficult than it sounds, but we shall never be able to deal with this basic cause of war if we keep running away from it...
...There is only one alternative to such a program—an America armed to the teeth, a world of armed and suspicious camps, and war—an atomic war...
...spirit, and a fitful brooding over the atomic bomb...
...There has been no peace conference, no meeting of the minds, no basic pattern of settlement...
...If the United Nations Organization is an international agency to enforce the peace, what peace settlement will it have to enforce when it finally meets...
...Only last week Pravda, the Red daily which speaks for the Soviet Government, lashed out at proposals for strengthening the United Nations Organization and abolishing the power of each of the Big Five to veto the decisions of the rest of the world...
...Can't we, without benefit of all the diplomatic hocus-pocus, sit down with the Russians, the British, the French, and the others, and say: "We'll drop our plan for universal conscription...
...5Encourage and transplant to Europe the soundly ? conceived, Lincoln-like policy Gen...
...Every report from Germany and Austria, whether from newspaper correspondents, Army officials, or civilian observers, tells the same melancholy story of how our monstrous policy of revenge is operating against our own self-interest and against the maintenance of peace...
...Would Soviet Russia, which insists on the right to veto every action of the United Nations Organization, and torpedoes conferences which fail to do her bidding1, consent to surrender her sovereignty to a world government she could not control...
...In one half of the world, from Palestine and Iran to India, Indo-China, Indonesia, and China, where live half the people of the earth, the war goes on, in one form or another...
...In the other half of the world, where the guns are stilled at last, there is a paralysis of the spirit, a numbness of mind and morals, a haunting fear that the fruits of victory are rotting even before we pick and taste them...
...IT sounds tough, doesn't it...
...Gone is the moral indignation over the collapse of principles and the flouting of wartime pledges...
...Our present policy of building enforcement machinery even before we have anything to enforce is bound to fail...
...Our policy in Japan has been the reverse of the course we have pursued in Germany, and has, of course, produced a totally opposite result thus far...
...The fight for a just and lasting peace has only just begun, but it will take a new vision, a courageous willingness to stand up and be counted, and unceasing struggle by progressive-minded people everywhere if we are to reverse the present trend...
...In fact we have tried everything but idealism up to now...
...Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Byron Price, the President's special envoy in Europe, joined in calling for a modification of those harsh and unenforceable terms...
...Would Great Britain, selfishly determined to continue milking her colonies, regardless of the price the world must pay in blood and tears, permit a world government to end her imperial rule ? To ask the questions, it seems to me, is to answer them...
...Many sacrifices will be necessary, of course, but the price of peace, however great, is just a tiny, almost invisible fraction of the cost of World War III...
...The democratic, anti-imperialist alternative is our only hope—the only hope of a -world hungering for peace but saddled by suspicion and power politics with a crushing new burden of armaments and saddened by the selfish maneuvering of the Great Powers with the fear of a new and ghastlier war...
...The collapse of the Potsdam settlement, which was based on blind vengeance and dismemberment, is now so complete that during the past week President Truman, Gen...
...Absent is a driving desire to buckle down to the breath-taking problems we face at home and abroad...
...From the press, the radio, and the public platforms comes an endless stream of cure-alls, most of them, like the pink pills of the quack, easy to take and less than half the price of good medicine...
...More than six months after the unconditional surrender of Germany, it is still impossible for the rest of the world to write to German friends or relatives, or send them food or clothing—no matter how anti-Nazi they may have been or how desperate may be their need...
...Pravda made sense, it seems to me, when it scorned the notion that the world could skip over all its immediate problems and find peace in world government...
...THE cozy theory that you can solve the world's problems by erecting a global tent over them has bewitched too many tired liberals who don't like to face up to the concrete problems of India, Indonesia, Indo-China, China, Palestine, Iran, Egypt, Greece, Spain, Italy, the Balkans, and Latin America...
...Far from it...
...Looking back over the months that have slipped away since the end of the war, one is struck by the fact that all our attention, all our energies, and all our planning have been centered on the forms of organization to enforce the peace, rather than on the substance of the peace settlement itself...
...This is the time to make a fresh start, to tear up the sordid pages of the past and present, and to begin anew, in a spirit of candor and cooperation, to write a peace based on justice for all...
...And present is a sort of dejected apathy, a'callous acceptance of the very doctrines of hate and intolerance and force that we thought we were fighting to overthrow, a weariness of body and...
...IS the situation then hopeless...
...This sordid pursuit of a policy of revenge for its own sake, of planned prostration and calculated misery for a whole people, has extended so far as to ban the shipping of Christmas packages of any kind in this holiday season when the formulators of and apologists for that policy are talking with pious hypocrisy of the glory of Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount...
Vol. 9 • December 1945 • No. 50
