[ p. 201 ]
FOR some thousands of years we have been struggling for peace. That we have never reached our goal does not prove that peace is unattainable. But it does prove that the means and methods by which we have tried to achieve it are inadequate.
In 1919, completely misunderstanding the forces of his time and the meaning of the crisis which he was called upon to solve, Woodrow Wilson rejuvenated all the eighteenth century conceptions of nationalism. The order created after the first World War was the apotheosis of nationalism, of national sovereignty, of self-determination of nations, of the right of each nationality to its own sovereign state.
For twenty years the world agonized in the strait-jacket [ p. 202 ] of this rigid structure which prevented organic integration of the nations, led to higher and higher tariffs, to mistrust, unemployment, hatred, misery, dictatorships, armaments—and the second World War.
It would seem that all these horrible events might have shaken the blind confidence in those outdated and deadly dogmas, and that the people who have to lead the nations through this holocaust might at least have searched for the real causes of the crisis and for the path that could lead us out of it.
The tragic fact, however, is that we are neither heading nor thinking in a new direction. Those in power have no time and no incentive to think. And those who think have no power whatsoever.
All the documents and pronouncements of the governments of the United Nations prove that they have nothing else in mind than a return to the old policies that failed so completely. It is a strangely topsy-turvy world in which all governments, statesmen, diplomats, politicians and party leaders are ardent protagonists of theories and conceptions so evidently at variance with the realities of our time.
During the second World War the documents in which are crystallized the thoughts of the United Nations are the Atlantic Charter, the United Nations Declaration, the Moscow, Teheran and Yalta agreements, the Dumbarton Oaks proposals and the San Francisco Charter.
When the Atlantic Charter was first proclaimed, the democratic world was thrilled to the marrow. That thrill derived more from the event itself than [ p. 203 ] from the contents of the proclamation. After a series of Brenner Pass meetings between Hitler and Mussolini, each the prelude to further Axis triumphs, the high-seas meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill was novel and dramatic; it held the promise of triumphs for the enemies of the Axis.
Does the Atlantic Charter—does the world view implicit in that document offer a new approach to the solution of international problems?
The underlying idea of the Atlantic Charter is expressed in its third paragraph: “They (the President of the United States and the British Prime Minister) respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.”
That is the charter of the first World War.
That is a reiteration of the old doctrine of self-determination, upon which we built the world of 1919 that crumbled so miserably and so quickly. The Atlantic Charter again proclaimed the right of every nation to choose the form of government it desires—or the form imposed upon it by a ruthless minority. It bowed abjectly before the fetish of “national sovereignty” with all that it implies: unlimited terror and organization for aggression within any nation so inclined; nonintervention in military epidemics until too late; blind isolationism and neutrality in a world made small by science and interdependent by industry.
The Atlantic Charter, for all its fine intentions, is an anachronism. If applied it would divide the [ p. 204 ] world into more and yet more nations, each of them independent of the others, unlimited in its sovereign right to do mischief. It recognized the right of any country to he as undemocratic and totalitarian as it pleases, a law unto itself. It failed to recognize and to implement larger sovereignties that transcend national sovereignties, human rights that take precedence over national rights.
Self-determination is no guarantee of independence. The sad fate of the small nations set up at Versailles proves that Even before their freedom was finally wiped out by the rampant and self-determined nationalism of Nazi Germany, they could maintain the illusion of independence only by accepting the patronage and protection of one of the more powerful nations. Independence in its absolute form produces only fear, mistrust, conflict, slavery—because it penalizes pacific nations and gives the right of way to aggressors and troublemakers among countries.
The third paragraph of the Atlantic Charter, in one terse phrase, enshrines the tragic misunderstanding of our generation.
We all assume it to be true that freedom and independence are the inalienable rights of man, and we are seeking to create institutions to guarantee and safeguard those rights. In the eighteenth century our forebears found those guarantees and safeguards in the principle of national sovereignty, in the institutions of the sovereign nation-state, controlled by the people, and in the rights of all peoples to self-determination, to choose the form of government, the structure of their political and economic system within the [ p. 205 ] territorial boundaries of their state, to do so of their own free will without foreign interference.
These concepts and these institutions, in their absolute form, were perfectly capable of expressing and protecting national independence as long as contact between the established national units was either nonexistent, unnecessary or loose. Since modern industrialism, science and communications have shrunk this planet of ours into a sixty-hour flying trip, and vrill continue to shrink it further; since no nation, not even the mightiest, is economically self-sufficient; since industry seeks to gain markets all over the world and can develop only within a framework where exchange and free communication are possible, these eighteenth century concepts, as expressed in the treaties of 1919 and in the Atlantic Charter, create in their absolute form, conditions similar to a society in which individuals may act as they please, without any limitations on their impulses, without any consideration as to the effect of their actions on other members of that society. In their absolute form, the principles upon which the Atlantic Charter is based lead straight to anarchy in international life.
If this present trend cannot be reversed, we are heading toward nationalism more frenzied and delirious than ever. If we ding to the principle of selfdetermination of nations, we shall have to face the claims of the innumerable nationalities in Europe, Asia, even in Africa, to have sovereign states of their own.
The principle of “self-determination of nations” is a primitive and oversimplified expression of the [ p. 206 ] concept of national independence. It is designed to work in laboratory conditions. Present-day realities, however, produce too many interferences to make possible the application of such a hypothetical formula without recurrent explosions.
The right of one man is the fruit of the obligations of all men. In social life, this is self-evident. No organized society is conceivable without a codification of the rights and duties of all members of that society. Now, irresistible and inexorable events force us to organize the relations of nations. In international life, however, we refuse to acknowledge this fundamental principle of society, and insist that a workable world order be built upon a Bill of Rights without a Bill of Duties. We fail to recognize that what made the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of the Rights of Man possible were the Ten Commandments.
The Atlantic Charter, far from explaining the causes of this world catastrophe and indicating the road to real freedom and independence, again lured mankind toward the mirage of peace, toward a belief that we can have peace and all our cherished democratic ideals if only we give every nation complete self-determination and “the right to choose its own form of government.”
The ideals of group independence and group selfdetermination have degenerated into an idol which must be destroyed in our minds if we ever want to see again exactly what that ideal really means.
In the Atlantic Charter as well as in all the other documents and pronouncements relating to a future world organization, there lies an implication that is a [ p. 207 ] dangerous fallacy. This is the widespread and generally accepted notion about the nature and causes of aggression.
Aggression is popularly considered the root of all international evils, the cause of all wars. This fundamentally erroneous premise logically leads to the equally erroneous conclusion that the task of peacemakers is to suppress aggression.
The idea of setting up inter-national machinery with no other purpose than to “prevent aggression”—to “keep the peace”—as the slogan goes, not only misses the point completely, hut indeed may become the source of grave consequences.
Peace is conceivable only as a social order having the machinery necessary to carry out all the organic changes and modifications in human society that may at any time be required by the natural and uninterrupted development of that society.
Such an order of never-ending reform is the only alternative to recurrent outbreaks of violence. This only known alternative is the Rule of Law.
If there were no national legal order, then violence between the individuals, religions, parties, classes and other groups within a given nation would be inevitable. Violence under such conditions is an absolutely natural phenomenon, indispensable, unavoidable, even desirable for carrying out changes required by permanently evolving human society.
We know that so long as we believe in peace between sovereign nations and endeavor to maintain an established status quo between these nations (no matter what status quo) we shall have wars. If, on top of [ p. 208 ] this policy, which failed as often as it was tried in the past, we are going to create an international “security organization” to “prevent aggressions” or to stamp out aggression by force when it does occur, then we shall have created, certainly not peace but higher pressure on a society that is simmering, stronger obstacles to the irresistible torrent of events, which are bound to cause more and more violent eruptions, because in such an order change without violence is exceptional, if not impossible.
To condemn aggression irrespective of the conditions within which it takes place is a superficial truism which can never solve a problem of such complexity. We can never have peace and security by aiming at negative, static conceptions, like “preventing aggressions.” If we want to live a more civilized life, we shall simply have to go through the painful labor of setting up “a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair” proclaiming principles and fighting for them.
At one time, there were seven Saxon kingdoms in England eternally waging wars against each other. Then a foreigner, a conqueror from Normandy, crossed the Channel, invaded the island and unified the bickering, quarreling, warring Saxon tribes. By no imaginable moral standard was this a justifiable act in the eyes of those who lived on the island. It was clearly a case of brutal, unprovoked aggression. But was it evil? Was the unification of the English kingdoms, although brought about by a foreign conqueror, wrong?
The conquest of the American West was unquestionably [ p. 209 ] another case of brutal, unprovoked aggression. But was this opening of the American continent, this unification by aggressive methods, evil?
The planners of future peace should beware of their fundamental illusion: that they can create an order to last forever. No one can put this world into a strait-jacket. No one can design an order and freeze it into permanent shape. It is against the nature of things to create a system of national boundaries and alliances, of economic organization, and then command history to stand still; to consider anyone who attempts to change this order an “aggressor.”
When the essence of life is perpetual change, adherence to worn-out forms and static conceptions must lead to explosions, wars and revolutions. Static structures, too weak and rigid to withstand the storms of events, will be blown away like a house of cards.
Here is the fundamental fallacy of the idea of collective security, based on treaty agreements between sovereign nations, which seems to be the one and only dogma upon which this generation can visualize a world order.
All the peace treaties ever signed, all the alliances ever concluded on this planet, the Covenant of tibe League of Nations, the United Nations Organization, the principles of collective security, are identical in their fundamental conception. TTiey all arbitrarily divide the world into a number of sovereign social units, create a status quo, and try to prevent any changes in the established order except by unanimous consent, which makes no sense; or by force, which makes war.
[ p. 210 ]
The Covenant of the League, the Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco documents, the notion of collective security, are all static, Ptolemaic conceptions. They are antidynamic and consequently represent only barriers to peace, to life itself. They all seek solutions on a basis which—if it existed—would leave no problems to be solved.
Collective security without collective sovereignty is meaningless. The insecurity of the individual as well as of groups of individuals is the direct result of the nonexistence of law to govern their relations. Allowing sovereign sources of law to reside, not in the community but in the eighty-odd separate nation-states forming that community; attempting to make their coexistence peaceful, not by establishing institutions with sovereign power to create law binding all members of the collectivity but by agreements and treaties between the divided sovereign units, can never, under any condition, create security for that collectivity. Only a legal order can bring security. Consequently, without constitutional institutions to express the sovereignty of the community and to create law for the collectivity, there can be no security for that collectivity.
The debate among the representatives of the nations in drafting the charter of a world organization was exclusively limited to formalities and technicalities which have absolutely no bearing upon peace and the future of mankind. All the representatives of national governments are in full agreement in rejecting the only foundation upon which a peaceful international order could be constructed.
[ p. 211 ]
One of the technicalities is the question of voting within a council of sovereign nations. According to the Covenant of the League, in case of an “aggression” by any sovereign member state of the League, sanctions could be taken only by unanimous consent Naturally, this made the functioning of the inadequate League machinery—which under no conditions could have prevented major wars—utterly illusory.
No sovereign nation-state will ever freely admit that it is an aggressor, nor of its own free will, will it submit to sanctions imposed by other sovereign nations. So whenever a nation was accused by the League of aggression or threatened with sanctions, it merely tendered its resignation and left the party.
The accusing nations behaved just as hypocritically. When the consequences of such collective action were to be faced and decisions carried out against the offending nations, all the other sovereign members of the League followed the private interests of their individual nation-states. The use of force against any major power was unthinkable. That meant war.
This tragi-comic game will be repeated again and again, so long as we believe that a league or a council of sovereign nation-states can, under any circumstances, maintain peace among its members.
In a society without any system of law, no individual would ever trust a judge, a jury or a court even if composed of the most eminent and selfless of his fellows. No individual would ever freely submit his personal freedom and fortunes to the judgment of any group of men composed of members with no [ p. 212 ] higher authority than his own. No individual would ever submit of his free will, without defending himself by all means at his disposal, to interference in his life by a force, if the actions of that force had not previously been delineated and defined.
Individual members of a society are prepared to submit to one thing alone. To Law. They are ready to submit to social institutions only insofar as those institutions are the instruments of Law.
Such law is nonexistent in our inter-national life. It never did exist in inter-national relations. It has been excluded from the League of Nations and from the United Nations Organization. Under these circumstances, there can be no peace between nations.
To base “peace” on unanimous decisions of a certain number of sovereign national governments—in the present day, on the unanimous decisions of the five greatest military powers—means indulging in a daydream. It is an Alice-in-Wonderknd adventure. And in seriously proposing such an organization and assuring the peoples of the earth that the five greatest military powers will—by common consent and unanimous decision—act in concert, our present leaders, our governments and diplomats are guilty of monstrous hypocrisy or else of naivet far greater even than Alice showed in her adventures in dreamland.
History proves beyond doubt that any real danger to world peace always emanates from one of the major military powers. It is to be expected that in every situation threatening the existing order, one of the major powers will be seriously involved. It is clear that the major power will not cast its vote in any inter-national [ p. 213 ] council against its own interests. Consequently, in no major crisis will unanimous vote in the security council be obtainable. Whenever such conflicts arise, as they are bound to arise, the only course open to the others will be to close their eyes and let the events of Manchuria, Austria, Ethiopia, Spain and Czechoslovakia repeat themselves—or go to war.
But even if the nations be prepared to accept majority decisions within such a world council, the problem would remain unsolved. Majority decisions in a council of sovereign nations would be wholly unrealistic. If in a given situation, three of the major powers voted for a certain military intervention, while the other two voted against such a measure, these two powers could scarcely be pictured taking up arms and undertaking military action contrary to what they regard as their own national interests, and contrary to their votes.
So the whole debate on unanimous vote versus majority vote on issues arising in a security council of a world organization is irrelevant because in neither case could a decision on an issue involving a great power be enforced without precipitating a major war.
The conclusion to be drawn is this: The fundamental problem of regulating the relations between great powers without the permanent danger of major wars cannot be solved so long as absolute sovereign power continues to reside in the nation-states. Unless their sovereign institutions are integrated into higher institutions expressing directly the sovereignty of the community, unless the relations of their peoples are [ p. 214 ] regulated by law, violent conflicts between national units are inevitable. This is not prophecy, not even an opinion, but an observable and irrefutable axiom of human society.
Just as a council of delegates and representatives of fifty sovereign cities, defending the interests of their respective municipalities, could never create a united nation, a national legal order, peaceful relations between the citizens of the fifty cities, security and freedom of the individuals living within each sovereign municipality—so the representatives and delegates of fifty sovereign nations meeting in a council and defending their own national interests, will never arrive at a satisfactory solution and settlement of any problem concerning the interrelations of the sovereign national units.
Just as peace, freedom and equality of the citizens of a nation require within their state specific institutions and authorities separate from and standing above municipal or local authorities, and the direct delegation of sovereign power by the people to these higher, national, government authorities—so peace, freedom and equality of men on this earth, between the nationstates, require specific institutions, authorities separate from and standing above national authorities, as well as the direct delegation of sovereign power by the people to these higher world government authorities, to deal with those problems of human relations that reach beyond the national state structure.
None of the projects and plans of a world organization even considers a direct relationship between the “international” organization and the individual. In all [ p. 215 ] these proposed and debated structures, the determining factor continues unchanged to be the nation-state.
All power, all decision, all action, all source of law, continues to rest with national governments. The individual remains the serf of the nation-states. The proposed society as contemplated by our governments, is clearly a society of the modern feudal lords, the nation-states, who are desperately trying to preserve their accumulated and abused privileges and power to the detriment of the peoples they oppress.
In the major countries, particularly in the United States, people are heatedly debating whether their representatives in the proposed world security council should have power to act of their own volition regarding the application of force in case of an international conflict or whether they should refer baclc to their governments or to their legislative bodies for final approval.
The underlying point of the controversy against those who would not yield one iota of the rights and privileges of inherited institutions is that if the representative of the United States or of any other country in the world council is not empowered to use armed force against a nation declared to be an aggressor, but is obliged to wait upon the deliberations of his government or legislative body at home, weeks or months may be lost and this delay may paralyze the international machinery. But if the delegates do have full power to order the armed contingent of their countries to enter into action against an aggressor, then the international organization will be strong enough to enforce peace.
[ p. 216 ]
This issue is seriously debated by members of emments, by legislators, editors, columnists and radio commentators, as being the crucial issue on which war or peace in the future depends.
It is at once apparent that the controversy is of the shallowest, that the alternative put before us is purely formal. Whether we resolve to take this course or the other, whether the representatives of the five great powers in the security council are empowered to engage the armed forces of their countries in action or whether before such decisions the situation must be debated in Congress or Parliament makes absolutely no difference. The course of events will not be changed by any of the suggested procedures, because the fundamental problem of war and peace has no relationship whatsoever to these procedures.
Whether the application of force is an act of war or a police action depends upon one single criterion: whether or not the force is being used to execute the judgment of a court, applying established law in a concrete case.
If force is used without previously enacted law, defining clearly the principles of human conduct and the norms determining such conduct, then the use of force is arbitrary, an act of violence, war whether the decision to resort to it be made by a national representative as a member of an inter-national council, by a national legislative assembly, or even by national referendum.
In the charter of the new world organization, there is no provision for the creation of law regulating the relations of the nations. On the contrary, it is [ p. 217 ] clearly stated that sovereign power to create law is the exclusive appanage of the individual nation-states, and that the international organization is an association of such sovereign nation-states.
There being no law to define human conduct in inter-national relations, any use of force is arbitrary, unjustified, an act of war. Such an international organii ition may succeed in unimportant issues when force can be used by a major power or by a combination of powers against a weak and small nation. It is bound to fail whenever such use of force has to be resorted to by one power or group of powers against another power or group of powers with equal or approximately equal military strength. The application of force against a great power by a small nation in case th~ great power commits the aggression is, ab ovo, unthinkable and need not be discussed.
Such a state of affairs has absolutely nothing to do with the functioning of a police force in society. Such an organization as was the League and as the new international organization drafted at Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco does not differ in any except external and formal aspects from the state of affairs that has always and at all times existed, without a league or any world organization.
Sovereign source of law remains scattered in many units. This always meant and, by the very force of things must always mean, violent conflict between these sovereign units, no matter what their relations, as long as sovereign power continues to reside in each separate unit
Peace between the conflicting units is possible only [ p. 218 ] if their relations are regulated by a higher sovereign authority embracing all of them. Once this is recognized, once developments are under way for the creation of law in international relations, then the use of force follows automatically, since real law implies its application by force.
But without previously enacted laws for international conduct, any proposal to use force is immoral and dangerous in the highest degree. It is an unforgivably false conception to believe that force without the pre-existence of law can maintain peace and prevent war, if the decision as to its application rests in the individual sovereign nation-states forming the inter-national society, no matter which department of the sovereign nation-states may be endowed with that power.
The tremendous volume of irresponsible talk on this most delicate problem has warped the judgment even of the most illustrious leaders of the United Nations.
In a speech made on October 21, 1944, President Roosevelt, warmly advocating the Dumbarton Oaks agreements, made the following statement:
“The council of the United Nations must have the power to act quickly and decisively to keep the peace by force if necessary. I live in a small town. I always think in small town terms. But this goes in small towns everywhere. A policeman would not be a very effective policeman if, when he saw a felon break into a house, he had to go to the Town Hall and call a town meeting to issue a warrant before the felon could be arrested. It is clear that, if the world organization [ p. 219 ] is to have any reality at all, our American rep resentative must be endowed in advance by the people themselves, by constitutional means through their representatives in Congress with authority to act.”
To compare the role of a policeman in a small town with the use of force as suggested by the Dumbarton Oaks documents reveals a complete misunderstanding of the fundamental principles involved. The policeman in a small town is endowed with the power to arrest a felon by previously promulgated laws created by the sovereign legislative body of the society he serves. He is the instrument of a legal order and acts under authority of established law.
The “police force” suggested by the Dumbarton Oaks proposals is not the executive organ of a society having an established legal order based on the sovereignty of that society, but the armed contingents of the sovereign nation-states, the sovereign units composing a society, which itself remains completely without sovereign authority. The Dumbarton Oaks proposals do not contain any suggestions for the creation of law standing above and binding together the individual members of the international society. They do not propose international courts to apply laws, nor could these hypothetical courts function, lacking the laws to apply. And they do not propose police forces to execute such judgments, responsible to the society itself, nor could such hypothetical force be a police force without courts to render judgment according to law.
In a world society organized on the basis of the Dumbarton Oaks proposals, it may well be that the [ p. 220 ] man to do the arresting would be not the policeman but the felon himself.
This is precisely the problem The police force, as conceived at Dumbarton Oaks, is no different from the legions of the Roman Empire or the armies of the Holy Alliance. They would be armed forces of sovereign powers or power groups and instruments of particular interests.
To revive the old League of Nations or to create a United Nations council on a similar basis (composed of representatives of sovereign nation-states), is an extremely simple proposition, although many people become emotional in debating the role of great powers and small powers in such a council.
The “idealists” plead for equality between great powers and small nations in the world organization, the “realists” want to give a preponderant role to the great powers, who under any circumstances would have to assume responsibility for checking aggression.
The realists who welcome the resurrection of the League of Nations under another name, with dentures in it (they say “with teeth”) arrive at the peculiar conclusion that since no great power would accept military action against itself without resistance, the use of force is practicable only against small nations.
So what they really say is that the use of force against a small nation can preserve peace, but force could not be applied against a great power because that would provoke war.
According to them, the use of force against a small nation is qualitatively different from the use of force [ p. 221 ] against a great power because in the first instance force brings peace, whereas in the second it brings war.
The hair-raising hypocrisy of mankind is truly astonishing. What this theory amounts to is that the theft of a loaf of bread by a poor man is an illegal act to be prosecuted, but the fraud of a millionaire banker must remain beyond the authority of law.
The assertion that the use of force against a small nation is “police power” whereas the same coercion against a great nation is not “police power” but war, is mere abracadabra. It is the result of muddled thinking, of ignorance of the meaning of the words and terms employed. It is not an attempt to shape policy according to principles; it is an attempt to justify an immoral and intolerable policy by elevating it to the level of a principle.
Force is police power when it is used to carry out the law, whether directed against a small or a great power, whether against a weak, miserable vagrant sleeping on a park bench or a strong, organized gang armed with guns who can shoot back at the police.
And force is not police power when it is not used to carry out law—even if it is applied by the unanimous consent of all the powers of the world against the smallest and weakest.
This great power versus small power controversy may go on forever, as it has all the characteristics of a meaningless issue that can be endlessly debated by an avalanche of words hiding particular interests and subjective feelings.
[ p. 222 ]
From the moral point of view, it is hard indeed to choose between great powers and small nations.
All great powers behave like gangsters. And all small nations behave like prostitutes.
They must. Under present conditions Cnot unlike those of the wild West), each great power mistrusts the others, must be permanently armed, keep his gun loaded and within easy reach to shoot it out with the others, if he wants to survive and keep his position. And the smaller powers who have no guns and who would never dare shoot it out with one of the big fellows, must go with those who promise them most, and in return for this protection, do whatever is demanded of them.
In the face of these realities, an organization of such sovereign nations, whether on an equal or an unequal footing, could never prevent another war. It is idealism raised to the nth degree of naivet6 to believe otherwise. Such a council of sovereign units could prevent another war only if it could change human nature and make it act and react differently from the way it has been acting and reacting throughout the ages.
The national interests of the powers, large and small, do not run parallel, just as the selfish interests of individuals do not run parallel. If we want to remain on a sovereign nation-state basis, then the only chance of a somewhat longer period without war is to keep the sovereign nation-states as far apart as possible, to reduce contact between them to a minimum and not to bring them together in one organization where the conflict of their interests will only be intensified.
[ p. 223 ]
Such superficial formalities Lave been debated for several decades now, the world running around in circles like a dog chasing its own tail, without even a glimpse of reality. The era of parchment treaties signed by the representatives of “peace-loving nations” or “high contracting powers” is gone, like the age of powdered wigs.
As long as our purpose is to establish peace between sovereign nations, it is wholly irrelevant whether the sovereign national governments maintain relations by the exchange of ambassadors, by dispatching notes to each other via short-wave or pigeon post, or by sending representatives to meet in an assembly or around a council table, with representatives of other equally sovereign nations. These are merely differences in method and procedure. None of them even touches the core of the problem created by the interdependence of a given number of social groups with equal, sovereign attributes.
It seems that the first and last maxim of national governments in quest of peace is “All measures—short of law.” As peace is identical with law, it is not difficult to realize why we are no nearer our goal than we have been for centuries.
It is a mysterious characteristic of human nature that we are prepared to spend anything, to sacrifice everything, to give all we have and are when we wage war, and that we are never prepared to take more than an “initial step” make more than a “first beginning” adopt more than “minimum measures,” when we seek to organize peace. When will our religions, our poets and our national leaders give up "the lie that death is more heroic than life?
[ p. 224 ]
The events of the first half of the twentieth century and all the national, political, ideological and economic forces at work today make it inexcusable for us to continue to delude ourselves, to continue to listen to false prophets, no matter how good their intentions, who preach that we may have peace merely by patching up outworn systems and revising archaic doctrines that have always led and will continue to lead to war.
When events and realities conflict with established principles, we must not always think that such events and realities are in “violation” of the principles. Often, the established principles are as false as Ptolemy’s astronomical principles and can be rectified only by giving up quixotic ideas and adapting principles to realities as did Copernicus.