The Press TUESDAY, AUGUST 26, 1941. The Problem of War

Press, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23417, 26 August 1941, Page 6

The Press TUESDAY, AUGUST 26, 1941. The Problem of War

There is one passage in Mr Churchill’s broadcast speech which will cause some mystification. At the end of their eight-point declaration, Mr Churchill and Mr Roosevelt recorded their conviction that “all the nations of the “world, for realistic as well as spiritual rea- “ sons' must come to abandon the use of force.” Mr Churchill has now descended from this Utopian height to what some will welcome as stern realism and others deplore as blank pessimism. Great Britain and the United States, he says, will\not repeat the mistake of 1919 by assuming that there will never be war again; on the contrary, they will disarm any guilty nation and will at the same time “take meas"ures to protect their own interests.” In the absence of any proposals for establishing a system of international government based on collective security, or of any statement that such a system is desirable, this must be read as meaning that the peace which follows this war will be a peace guaranteed by the military weakness of the vanquished and the military strength of the victors. The effect of this grim promise is, it is true,, softened a little by Mr Churchill’s further statement that “instead of “ ruining the defeated enemy by trade barriers “such as were erected in 1918, the Allies had “agreed that it was not in the interests of the “world that any great\nation should be deprived of the means of making herself prosperous by her own industry and enterprise.” But this qualification involves a distinction between military power and economic power which is unreal. The lesson of German disarmament in 1918 and the extraordinarily rapid rearmament of Germany after 1933 is that a nation with vast industrial equipment and resources is potentially a great military power. To accept the proposition that peace can be guaranteed only by disarming the vanquished is to accept also the proposition that the vanquished should be reduced to a condition of economic as well as military inferiority. Actually, the common sense of world peace lies somewhere between the sweeping renunciation of force contemplated in the last passage of the Churchill-Roosevelt declaration and Mr Churchill’s seeming acceptance of force as the only basis'of peace. It is indeed foolish to assume, as was assumed in 1919, that war will not occur again because no sensible person wants war. But it is not foolish to assume that the nations of the world, organised in a League of Nations or some similar institution, have it in their power to devise a. substitute for war as a means of settling international disputes and a method of punishing nations who resort to aggressive wars. Possibly a society of ■ nations cannot “ abolish ” war any more than the State can “ abolish ” acts of violence by one individual against another. But by providing 'courts to settle disputes between individuals and by mobilising the moral sense of the community against lawless violence, the State has so reduced the extent of resort to violence as a- means of settling individual, disputes that relatively small reserves of force are necessary for the maintenance of internal order. What societies of individuals have accomplished, a society of nations can accomplish—and by approximately the.same methods.. In these years of disillusionment it is important to remember that the League of Nations came very close to finding a solution of the problem of war along these lines. To relapse into despair because the League failed, in a brief 20 years, to bring war under control, is to lose all sense of the gradualness of social change. The alternative to an attempt to rebuild the collective security system on surer foundations is an alternative which offers, at best, an uneasy peace for two or three decades during which the vanquished will prepare revenge and the victors will shiver and bicker behind their battlements. In such a peace there is no possibility of substantial social progress, no possibility of a broadening out of individual freedom, and no possibility of arresting the growth of those diabolic forces, of cruelty and oppression which are dragging the human race back into the dark ages. -