WANTED A PACIFIST TECHNIQUE

Evening Star, Issue 22572, 13 February 1937, Page 2

WANTED A PACIFIST TECHNIQUE

" In the prevention of further civil war it would seem that pacifists might concentrate upon the introduction of a little of the pacifist technique into the advocacy of rival social theories. If solutions are to be peaceful we cannot go on claiming for our especial social and political doctrines complete _ infallibility and complete irreconcilability with other doctrines. It is impossible for Conservatives on one side, to go on saying: ‘ Socialism is the enemy and must be ruthlessly repressed; there can he no compromise with it ’; and for Socialists to go on saying, ‘The whole Capitalist order must be swept? away and property abolished,’ and to go on personifying ‘ thq capitalist class ’ in an evil-looking ‘ person ’■ emphasising the conflict of class as irreconcilable, insisting that there can be no gradual approach and increasing co-operation by consent. It is folly fop Tory and Socialist respectively to■ go on in this strain and at the same time disparage ‘ war.’ For war will come as the direct result of a psychological momentum inherent in these attitudes.”—Sir Norman Angell.