[ p. 116 ]
“You cannot make peace through war.”
This is one of the most dangerous sophisms with which the 100-per-cent pacifists have indoctrinated their propaganda against the use of force, against the application of sanctions, against any kind of action which might have prevented the outbreak of this world war.
Even if we call the application of force “war,” it must be said that only such application of force can preserve peace.
What is the difference between such an application of force advocated here and wars as we have known them heretofore?
The answer is very simple: The existence of law.
Though one of the first commandments of Christianity is “Thou shalt not kill,” the Church, when it had sovereignty to do so, condemned to death and executed thousands of individuals who had violated the laws. And since the existence of the nation-states, even in the most Christian and the most democratic ones, the application of force —execution, imprisonment and other forms of punishment—has been the only possible safeguard of Christian or democratic principles in human society.
[ p. 117 ]
There is no contradiction in that. And we must constantly keep in mind the development of our social organization if we sincerely want to find a solution to our presentday problem: the organization of international society.
The fact that there is no coercive international law creates a situation in which criminals, determined to act, enjoy all the liberties and all the advantages of lawlessness. In the present situation, simply because the repression or the prevention of a crime is not the result of the application of a law, of a judgment, of a punishment, it appears to us equally as a crime.
In fact, it is. Any punishment without law is equal to crime. Only the existence of law creates the difference between crime and justice.
It is, therefore, of primary importance that the principle of legal war as an instrument of democratic policy should be established. Only through the institution of legal wars shall we ever be able to preserve peace and never through alliances, or through such Utopian documents as the Covenant of the League or the Kellogg Pact.
The most important form of legal wars to be established is the preventive war. Just as in social life preventive measures are more human and more effective; just as the trend in modern medicine is to prevent diseases and not only to cure them, in international affairs we must try to prevent major armed clashes and not wait until the outbreak of hostilities is inevitable.
Until now the idea of preventive war has been taboo in democratic nations. Whenever in the democratic countries public opinion was aroused against the step-by-step preparation [ p. 118 ] for this war by the totalitarians, the Fascist propagandists shouted that the democracies wanted a preventive war, because naturally they would not stop acting as they did unless the democracies applied force. And this was sufficient argument to disarm the will of resistance in the democracies and to give to the “appeasers” power to arrange matters with the enemies of democracy: to capitulate rather than to fight.
Never was a war more unnecessary and easier to prevent than the war we have to suffer today. It was clear to every man with the senses to see and hear and understand that the totalitarian conceptions were aiming at the destruction of the democratic powers and at the domination of the world. Nothing would have been easier to prevent the growing might of our enemies than the undertaking of a preventive operation which, until 1938, would have been insignificant.
It is beyond discussion that the policy of the democratic powers, to wait passively until the moment when this world war became inevitable, was a false policy. But it is useless to reproach democratic governments for this disastrous policy. They acted in the only way in which they were authorized to act according to the established constitutions, laws and principles of their countries.
Whether we shall ever be able to organize human society in such a way that wars will be made impossible, and that “eternal peace” will reign over this planet, is impossible to tell. Most probably it will never be possible to attain this ideal. We must be more modest and more realistic if we want to attain at least something, and take the next step in [ p. 119 ] the direction of this ideal. And this next step is the prevention of world wars on the scale and with the destructive power of the 1914-18 World War and the present one.
This can only be done through the institution and legalization of preventive wars, as common democratic action against the growth and spreading of anti-democratic destructive forces which must and will always lead into illegal wars.
Without such institution of law, it will never be possible to make democratic nations aware of the seriousness of a situation until it is too late. To ordinary people, the appeal for inaction is always much stronger than the appeal for action. There will always be an overwhelming majority in critical times who in democratic countries will say: “It is none of our business”; “Let us keep out of it”; “Let us concentrate on the defense of our own country and to hell with the others.” And those who instinctively would urge action and prevention will always be called “warmongers,” in spite of the fact that action might prevent a major war, whereas inaction will certainly bring war.
Once we have established such an organization, we shall probably have two or three wars in a century, but they will be infinitesimally smaller in character, their devastation and destructive power will be incomparably less, and the relationship between those legal wars to the present and past wars will be the same as the relationship is between the killings among cannibal tribes and the murder cases in a modern civilized state.
The mere institution of preventive war as a legal instrument of international policy, the mere threat of it, would [ p. 120 ] prevent wars in nine cases out of ten, and make the use of this instrument unnecessary.
The only kind of peace conceivable on this globe arid in the present century is the establishment of certain primary rules among peoples and the institution of armed forces to intervene automatically and unconditionally in any part of the world wherever these rules are violated. Such a revolutionary change can never be brought about without the full recognition of the out-dated order which only catastrophes like the present world war can reveal. We must hope that this war will bring the truth of the character and relationship of peace and war, and of the problems connected with them, to the minds of the masses, and that a clear vision of a better future will be shaped during this war, while the butchery and the misery last. If we miss that chance, generations may have to wait for another.
Justice started on this earth with the first public execution of a criminal based on judgment.
Peace will start on this earth on the day when for the first time a group of nations will wage war, based on previously accepted principles, against a violator of international law.