LOGIC AND PEACE

Press, Volume LXXXVI, Issue 26211, 7 September 1950, Page 5

LOGIC AND PEACE

Sir, —To J. M. Cronin, where, please, do I speak of “experts in discussion”? My three professors are experts in the four branches of their subject, philosophy, viz., logic, ethics, psychology and metaphysics. Practice in daily radio discussion will no doubt make them expert in discussion as well. If not, their very inexpertness will enable them to retain a more human link with their listeners. Second, please read again my initial letter (“The Press,” August 18). Peace-lovers wage peace, not war. Like Gandhi, they may be killed while so doing, but they prefer being killed to killing others. Neither logic nor ethics supports the idea that waging war can further the ideal of peace. To “Main Sequence,” I agree. Dr. Lapp, atomic expert, expects 10,000,000 to 15,000,000 Americans to perish in the first day of an atomic war. Can “Main Sequence” suggest one single peaceful practical step to try to stop this?—Yours, etc., N. M. BELL. Sept. 6, 1950.

Sir, —It is interesting to read Aldous Huxley about the present state of world thought. I quote from one of his essays in “The Olive Tree” (1936). “The ‘force’ that is war, particularly modern war. is very different from the ‘force’ that is police action; and the use of the same abstract word to describe the two dissimilar processes is profoundly misleading. (Still more misleading, of course, is the explicit assimilation of a war, waged by allied League of Nation Powers against an aggressor, to police action against a criminal. The first is the use of violence and fraud without limit against innocent and guilty alike; the second is the use of strictly limited violence and a minimum of fraud exclusively against the guilty).”—Yours, etc., A. S. ROWE. Sept. 6, 1950.